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The Oklahoma Review Volume 14: Issue 2, Fall 2013
Published by: Cameron University Department of English and Foreign Languages
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Staff Faculty Advisor DR. BAYARD GODSAVE Faculty Editors GEORGE MCCORMICK, DR. JOHN G. MORRIS, DR. HARDY JONES & DR. JOHN HODGSON Assistant Editors ANGELA BAUMANN, AMANDA GOEMMER, CASEY BROWN, MELISSA JOHNSON, NICK BRUSH, & SARA RIOS Web Design ELIA MEREL & HAILEY HARRIS Layout CASEY BROWN Mission Statement The Oklahoma Review is an electronic literary magazine published through the Department of English at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. The editorial board consists of English and Professional Writing undergraduates, as well as faculty advisors from the Departments of English and Foreign Languages & Journalism. The goal of our publication is to provide a forum for exceptional fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in a dynamic, appealing, and accessible environment. The magazine’s only agenda is to promote the pleasures and edification derived from high‐quality literature. The Staff The views expressed in The Oklahoma Review do not necessarily correspond to those of Cameron University, and the university’s support of this magazine should not be seen as any endorsement of any philosophy other than faith in – and support of – free expression. The content of this publication may not be reproduced without the written consent of The Oklahoma Review or the authors.
Call for Submissions The Oklahoma Review is a continuous, online publication. We publish two issues each year: Spring (May) and Fall (December). The Oklahoma Review only accepts manuscripts during two open reading periods. •Reading dates for the Fall issue will now be from August 1 to October 15 •Reading dates for the Spring issue will be January 1 to March 15. Work sent outside of these two periods will be returned unread. Guidelines: Submissions are welcome from any serious writer working in English. Email your submissions to okreview@cameron.edu. Writers may submit the following: •Prose fiction pieces of 30 pages or less. •As many as five (5) poems of any length. •Nonfiction prose pieces of 30 pages or less. •As many as five (5) pieces of visual art—photography, paintings, prints, etc. •All files should be sent as e‐mail attachments in either .doc or .rtf format for text, and .jpeg for art submissions. We will neither consider nor return submissions sent in hard copy, even if return postage is included. •When sending multiple submissions (e.g. five poems), please include all the work in a single file rather than five separate files. •Authors should also provide a cover paragraph with a short biography in the body of their e‐mail. •Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please indicate in your cover letter if your work is under consideration elsewhere. •Please direct all submissions and inquiries to okreview@cameron.edu.
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Cover Art Katherine Liontas-Warren, “A Lost Culture”
Creative Non-Fiction 10 Megan Vered, “No Feet on the Railing”
Poetry 16 Zarah Moeggenberg, “I Always Cover Their Faces” 17 Rachel Parker Martin, “San Jose” 19 Rachel Parker Martin, “San Jose (Translation)” 21 Rachel Parker Martin, “The Pilgrimage” 23 Phil Estes, “Lost City Road” 24 Phil Estes, “Yahweh out of line” 25 B. Tacconi, “A Blank Converse” 26 Nicole Santalucia, “Kids on the Southside” 27 28 29 30 31
David David David David David
Galef, Galef, Galef, Galef, Galef,
“Meeting” “Difference and Balance” “Protection” “Guilt” “Fostering”
32 Jim Davis, “You Are Your Own Voice Hephaestus” 33 Jim Davis, “Hotcakes” 34 Angela Spofford, “Fish” 35 Angela Spofford, “Weld Country” 36 Jordan Sanderson, “Struck” 37 Jordan Sanderson, “Bolt” 38 Jose Angel Araguz, “Dandelions” vi
Fiction 42 Phong Nguyen, “Jesus, Unforsaken” 49 Constance Squires, “Wayfaring Stranger” 58 James Brubaker, “Three Television Shows About Familial Love” 61 Rob Roensch, “In the Dark”
Reviews 74 Ashley Galan, “A Review of Stuart Youngman “Sy” Hoahwah’s Night Cradle and Velroy and the Madischie” 76 Nick Brush, “A Review of Michael Nye’s Strategies Against Extinction”
Interviews 78 George McCormick, “‘Love Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Have to Go to the Dentist’: An Interview with Francesca Abbate”
Contributors 86
Contributor’s Page
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Non‐Fiction
Megan Vered
No Feet on the Railing We entered the courtroom through the heavy double doors and, purposeful as High Holiday Jews, moved en masse toward a row of empty seats. No feet on the railing, the small sign commanded. The sign failed to advise me where exactly my feet ought to go, but I did get the message that it would be frowned upon to shift my feet up to the railing. They would be unsettling, conspicuous. Could I tuck them under me on the seat of the chair or did they have to be properly placed on the scuffed hardwood beneath me? I looked around and pretty much everybody was seated with feet placed on the floor. The sign must be working, I thought. Otherwise we would all have our feet on the barrier that separated us from the judge. If it had been up to my mother, the accident never would have happened. She had been the main driver since my father lost his vision right after they were married and never let anyone else drive her car. On the way home from an impromptu weekend with friends, my father coerced her to hand over the wheel. He insisted that she was too tired and needed a break. My father asleep in the passenger seat. Mom in the back. The friend who was driving blacked out. A beautiful blue‐sky day. No traffic on the highway. Mom’s cherished turquoise Cadillac Seville launched headlong into a tree. No one was wearing a seatbelt. My father was killed instantly. No feet on the railing. No discourteous behavior. No pushing the limits. No going against the rules. It’s a good thing that on this murky January morning my father was sixteen years dead, because he would have pushed the envelope, and who knows how his behavior might have affected this outcome? But, of course, the situation we were facing was a result of his unlimited appetite for rogue business schemes. No paper trail left behind. He took it all with him. My father, who’d had no intention of dying abruptly at age sixty‐one, entrusted us with a complex trail of debt that even his young, crackerjack attorneys could not unravel. A flabbergasting concoction of American‐Jewish intellectual and high‐end horse trader, he was the antithesis of my mother, a quiet, constant, just‐so Bostonian who would never let her slip show in public. She used to tell me that after losing his sight, he lived every day like it was his last. The exhilaration of making a deal, of recrafting reality, was an addiction for him. For my mother it was an endurance test. 10
With the loss of my father, their house went into foreclosure and assets vaporized. But, even in death, my father had a wild card up his sleeve. He had purchased a $5 million piece of property in downtown San Jose that had only just sold. In the final analysis my mother stood a good chance of becoming a millionaire. The elderly judge, swathed in billowing black, entered through the back door and marched to his seat. Will all those present please stand. Please be seated. He tilted his head to accommodate his bifocal lenses and read out loud, The following cases have been approved unless any objections are raised: One, Leonard Hesterman, Three, Frank Hernandez, Five, Hugo Barnes, Eleven, Norman Weiss. He stopped when he reached number thirty‐two. I sucked in a huge lungful of air. The man seated in front of my mother shifted his body to the side, arm draped conspicuously on the back of the chair to his right. Could he hear the pounding of my heart? Could he be one who had come to raise an objection, who might demand more money than my father’s estate could offer? I scanned the room for hostile glances, set jaws, pursed lips. This was still enemy territory. I wondered if my father were to walk into the courtroom at this moment, would he recognize us? Mom, seated to my left, was grayer and propped up by a cane due to ligament damage sustained in the accident, and all of us more solemn, less innocent. The whomp of the gavel and the authoritative voice of the judge startled me. Hearing no objections, they are all approved. My mother’s attorney, out of his chair in a flash, rushed to the judge’s desk, where he was handed a commanding stack of papers. Frozen, I waited for someone to raise a hand and call out, I object! I object! Not a soul came forward. My younger sister, Eve, nudged me. Let’s go. No feet on the railing. Stand up, sit down. It was over before it had even begun. Given the way my father lived his life and the arduous wait for the estate to settle, I expected high drama in the courtroom. I was sure that the room would be filled with people demanding more than we were offering. But, surprisingly, none of those to whom my father owed money (there were over one hundred) even bothered to show up. The night before, in our hotel suite at the Crown Plaza in downtown San Jose, I called everybody over to my bed. Okay, you guys, close your eyes. I lifted the nonstick backing off with my fingernail and pressed a nametag onto my brother Oran’s shirt. Written in large Sharpie letters was Son of an Heiress. My sisters’ naturally said Daughter of an Heiress. Mom’s said Heiress Extraordinaire, and on her small, gray head I placed a paper crown adorned with plastic
flowers and fake money that I had created in my office before driving to San Jose. Given that her Hebrew name, Malka, means “queen,” it was fitting. The word Heiress was scrolled onto a magenta ribbon that hung alongside her ear. She laughed, lifting her hand to straighten the crown. Let’s just hope things go well tomorrow. They will, Mom, I have a good feeling. From your mouth to God’s ears. You don’t even believe in God. How about to Dad’s ears? I’m sure he’s listening. Yes, well, if you have a chance to talk to him, tell him
Mom’s said Heiress Extraordinaire, and on her small, gray head I placed a paper crown adorned with plastic flowers and fake money that I had created.
I will. Before the celebration lunch we had promised ourselves—regardless of outcome—we drove by the downtown property that had finally paid off. Some developer was clearly on the way to great wealth. Then to Dad’s gravesite in the Oak Hill cemetery. His grave was in the Jewish section of the cemetery, called Home of Peace. The five of us stood in a circle around his headstone. On the gray marble was etched: In the final analysis And beneath it: Leonard Hesterman, October 1921‐December 1982 “In the final analysis” had been one of my father’s stock phrases. He used it often during debates to drive a point home. I looked down at the grave and said, You know Mom, when you chose the wording for the headstone it struck me as… Flippant? Yes, but now… Now, standing by the grave, absorbing all the details that had led to this moment, I understood. My father’s life had been dedicated to evading rules and regulations. He had dodged the IRS, defaulted on loans, and consistently left a load of unpaid bills in his wake. Had he been in that courthouse with us, his feet would have been up on those railings. He would have nudged me and, in a vigorous whisper, said, Beware of the tight asses, they rule the world. In the final analysis, and from beyond the grave, my father had masterminded a happy ending for my mother. Hopefully he could now be at peace. 12
I dug around in the dirt by the wall surrounding the Jewish section and found a little stone for each of us to place on the headstone. One by one we knelt down and placed our stones where years ago we had cast a handful of dirt onto the casket. We held hands and bid our father one final, silent adieu. His reign as chief instigator had come to an end. Mom said, Okay, it’s time to move on, everybody. Let’s go find Grandma and Grandpa, my sister said. We moved to the other side of the cemetery in search of Bubbie and Zayde’s headstones. Born in Vilna and Kiev, my father’s parents were far away from home. Mom was the one who had purchased the plots and remembered that they were in the corner by the fence under a large tree. She remembered this because she thought that Bubbie would like being in the shade. Finding no side‐by‐side headstones in the corner and concluding that we were turned around, we scattered in different directions in search of two headstones bearing the name Hesterman. I passed Jane Rosenberg, 1933‐1974, Beloved mother; Bertha Cohen, 1921‐1975, Beloved sister and friend; Arthur Magid, MD, Beloved father and husband. I passed the grave of a child who had lived for a week. I felt the tears of generations falling down my cheeks. But I could not locate my grandparents. A maintenance worker passed by and I asked for help. He went to the office and, when he returned, walked to the very spot where we’d started, under the tree by the fence. Unwittingly, all of us had been standing right on top of Bubbie’s gravestone. I could hear her cry out, Shayna mamela! You found me! But where was Zayde? My brother, Oran, the agronomist, who loves the earth the way Zayde did, got on his hands and knees and ran his hands through the coarse Bermuda grass. It should be right here. And feeling around beneath the grass, he hit a hard surface. Maybe this is it. The worker and his buddy got their shovels from the truck and unearthed the gravestone, covered with at least three inches of sod and dirt. I could hear my grandfather—who, in his later years, had been a diligent and loving gardener—yelling Veizmere, cursing the shoddy plot maintenance. And so it was that after sixteen years of limbo, my mother became a millionaire. She went home and purged hundreds of green‐and‐white legal envelopes from the file boxes littering the floor of her guest bedroom. She found a real estate agent, bought a new house, and packed up her life. In the final analysis, she paid all of her utility bills on time and never had to worry about losing her power again.
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Poetry
Zarah Moeggenberg
I Always Cover Their Faces I always cover their faces. In orange traffic cones we overturn, their wings will give, their feet will rest against bib overalls. And I use a curved blade, the rapid stroke up and sideways—watch the blood run a red stream to quiet. We choose to slaughter early, the chickens gray, the snow fluorescent spills upon hay beds. They know our steady boots, their rush of breath slithers up the barn walls Their careful wings yawn into our palms. The first is young and sleek. My son, he teaches him, his steady cluck the cone—and hand releases the careful spill of feather body, curl of heart, the coo and tut of tight. Sam cups the cone between his knees, takes a sip of coffee, The mug has made a circle deep in shells of grains and press of claw, in winter dirt. He works the knife quick, he sees the blood run warm between his hands. He smoothes the body’s torque into a calm. I count the rest—eighteen today. I stay far from the bulb, the stool, the cone, the bucket. I taste my Folgers black. My son’s shoulders sharp, a tense I cannot touch. 16
Rachel Parker Martin San José Cuatro ventanas que son más grandes me envuelven en la luz extraña de la mañana temprano, de la fría diariamente que el sol debilito se muda como escalofríos de la ducha naturaleza. Soy el contorno como esas gotitas en un brillo apagado Que tiene una luz trémula como los dientes de los perros en la calle iluminado en otro taxi después otro taxi, con los faros que separaran la distancia entre su lado de la calle y mío. Me han sido revelados en mi silencio, mi tartajeo que es mancilla con su ladrido, el borrón de su preparación que vuelve ruidoso con las formas peligrosas en sus sombras que calculan mi encojo antes de mi espinazo puede. Al final del pasillo observo la forma de una mujer que llena sus ventanas con sus movimientos, preciso y lento. Su cuarto aparece tan grande sin estos pensamientos a almacenan, detrás de estanterías y maletas. ¿Tiene ella sueno sobre los perros gruñen y los coches que matan? Cuando la luz se envuelve su cuerpo la palma gris no vestirla en la carne de gallina. Su piel es una naranja ardiente que crece en el oscuro de su estómago brillante como luces de freno. (Esto es el fuego que yo busco, dedos negros que sacan entre carnicería cuneta, por encima de los ojos de los perros que aíslan donde se esconde la mejor carne: mi corazón carnal.) Está en el ojo de esta ciudad bestial que será encontrare mis colmillos, el coraje que formaré un charco con una sonrisa canina, que gruñe por una comida que quemaré mi meollo Una vez que ha labrado toda mi brillo E iré marcas de zarpas de mi destreza (Es la palabra más poderosa que esperanza, Ésta es la escritura de mi evolución)
Entenderé la significa del brillo debajo de la piel aun si tengo que cortarlo. Sólo entonces puedo dejar de escribir sobre mí. 18
San José (Translation) Four large glass panels engulf me in the strange light of early morning, the daily cold that the weakened sun sheds like shivers from nature’s shower. I am outlined like these droplets in a bleak glow that glimmers like the teeth of dogs in the streets, illuminated by another cab after another cab, headlights that split the distance between their side of the road and mine. I am revealed by my silence, my stutter that is blackened with their barking, the blur of their readiness that grows noisy with the dangerous shapes of their shadows that calculate my flinch before my spine can. Down the hall I watch the form of a woman who fills up her windows with her motions, precise and slow. Her room looks so large without these thoughts to store there, behind suitcase and shelves. Does she dream of snarling dogs and murder cars? When the light blankets over her body its grey palm does not dress her in gooseflesh. Her skin is a burning orange that grows in the dark of her stomach glittering like brake lights. (It is this fire that I search for, black fingers that pry between roadside carnage, past the eyes of the dogs that have isolated where the best flesh hides: my carnal heart.) It is in the eye of this bestial city that I will find my fangs, the courage that will pool with a canine curdling growling for a meal that will burn out my core. Once I have carved out all my brightness and leave claw marks of my craft (it is the word more powerful than hope it is the sculpture of my evolution)
I will understand the meaning of the glow beneath the skin even if I have to cut it out. Only then can I stop writing about me
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The Pilgrimage There is something about languishing this way in the gleaming stillness of afterward where the tender touch waits palms cross over knuckles needing kneading, the quiet clutch (We have become unstuck from mattress and monitor have lost form and finitude I cannot tell if beneath your hands is sand or stars) There is something in the way the wrist lilts, the almost tremble over the rib cage it is the pianist’s tremor before smoothing his fingerprints over the ivory, familiar and forgiving, markéd prodding gently for the first words, soft little breaths, plucking out songbirds from slumber; with cocked head and quaver, recognition laces the tongue and prompts the deep stretch of reunion, the comely warming of vertebrate, like the crack and the crumble of clay It is here that I find you, (When I become lost in the sea of myself limbs spread out across the water while you hold for me to find the tide) Basking on the last shore of the winter, peering into the crystalline still in the permanence of punctuation you rest in sentence and semi colon lounge in the arch of question and respite in the great pause, the deep breath that has become waiting for me (Is to be possessed to be free to tread water? My hands clasp and close, nebulous in the deep) When I cannot reach your wrist I hear you in the clink of can and key car door and glass bottle gasp against the mouth I carry you in the taste of ink on my tongue
and I will write you out my lips through the drag of fingernails across the chest beneath which the inkwell lies pulsing (We share the breath of our bodily script; we are the buoyant pages to be bound) This is it, you say, I find the clasp of fingers at last shoreline turns to sheets the waves crash into keyboard clicks and I have returned to us, to me your hand holds my face like a salvaged stone, this is it the beautiful shudder of being found. Winter is over.
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Phil Estes Lost City Road
Alexandria’s grandfather draws maps for all of us. “Let’s make real life easier with the technology available to us.” He draws all day in his backroom. Of the grandparents, one loves one set better. We went out and tubed down a river, into the ocean, then to this island where her other grandfather lived alone, older than the former. Alexandria said “he’s a good man but difficult.” Mmm‐hmm. This old man lived with a dog and a big blue crow. The crow had big sad eyes like armored‐men in Japanese silk‐screen art, his wings covered in paint. The old man said he hasn’t seen a human in so long. He just talks to the big blue crow all day. The crow cries rubies if you bully him. I tried but he just laughed. Not because I was funny but because I was so bad at making him cry. “Try again,” he said. “Try again,” the old man said.
Yahweh out of line
“Plots and schemes are the same thing,” Alexandria always says. I thought I had both, but probably neither, not when the guy in town with the retractable arm takes what he pleases. He emphasizes Super Joe. “Call me Super Joe. No one will name you themselves, except maybe mothers.” He takes mostly beers from people with the arm, which is metal piping that extends into a garden snake—not even a python? C’mon Super Joe! The claw at the end grabs the beer, money, little statues, etc. One time Super Joe considered taking ice cream from a child out on the street, during Some Festival, but he knew that was too much. I took some money from an old red and yellow donation box at church; donations to something we all forgot about. “That seems so much worse,” he said. 24
B. Tacconi
A Blank Converse She sighs and says the homeless bum me out. I look at each indifferent face that drifts by thinking who would choose a fate so full of potholes, concrete, cracks and weeds. Their eyes, so shallow, sink inside their sallow man‐ gled features. Nails compacted with dirt inquire through resin‐stained and shattered Tic Tac teeth for change? A smoke? I do not weigh myself with change, I cannot offer them relief. I would give them words, but they spend themselves. Their fingers retract at no return. She looks to me to see if I agree, I nod and wonder how sincere I am.
Nicole Santalucia
Kids on the Southside There are little boys with nicknames like Old‐Man Joe and Gramps hanging onto the chain linked fence. It’s like they are on the inside of the belly, trapped in their own guts looking out. Their arms and legs scorched from lit cigarettes and car lighters. I don’t know how boys survive when their hands are nailed to the walls of Johnson City, New York where people like me are considered road kill for these kids to play with. When they crawl through the hole in the fence they are born again and I can hardly breathe. 26
David Galef Meeting 虎
KO. tora tiger, drunkard.
The drunkard eyes the tiger, a striped rug of an animal with velvet paws, glass eyes, and a smell like cat piss. The tiger eyes the drunkard, a beast of a man, hands groping at his undone collar wilted in stale sweat. Maybe they can be friends, hunt boar, drink shōchū, or just prowl together. As they pad along the street, one of them growls.
—kanji entry 4105
*All definitions of Japanese characters (kanji) come from The Modern Reader’s Japanese‐English Character Dictionary, second revised edition, by Andrew Nelson (Rutland, VT, and Tokyo, Japan: Tuttle, 1974), though severely abridged.
Difference and Balance 差 SHI, SA: difference; variation; discrepancy; margin; balance; remainder (in subtraction). sa(su) vt stretch out (the hands in dancing); put up (an umbrella); carry (on the shoulder); build (a hut); stretch (a rope); graft (trees); carry (in the belt); lift up; offer. vi (the sun) shines; appear on the surface. sa(shi) sharpened tube for testing rice in bags. sa(shi) de between two persons. sa(shi) ruler (for measuring); face to face; hindrance; sharing a load.
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—from kanji entry 3661 Where to begin? What’s the balance or discrepancy between two variations close as a bird hovering over its shadow? Leave that on the margin defined by whatever remains after the hands have left the body to dance. It’s like the private penumbra from a parasol put up against the shoulder, Or the brute but artistic labor of grafting trees, stretching ropes, and building a hut. I carry an image of you in my belt. I offer a self‐appearance while the sun is minded to shine. I see you and you see me; Between us should be no hindrance. Come help test this rice bag: measure it; share my load.
Protection 冗
JŌ uselessness. —kanji entry 625 I’ve been called useless, but I’ve been called worse, a supernumerary official in charge of the overstock of a paper company that folded like last year’s origami in this most redundant of towns, Kubo‐Kubo. Now I patrol with a flashlight to see if anyone’s made off with the unsold expanse that will never turn into a smudged sumi‐e, a tedious tanka, or even a hastily scribbled joke because no one wants us. In a way I’m protecting people from trash. Even uselessness as its uses.
Guilt 汁
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JŪ, SHŪ juice. shiru sap; soup, pus. tsuyu broth; gravy. —from kanji entry 2485 The juice in my veins has turned to miso soup thin as the broth at the station café. The sap from the ginkgo tree has trickled out and dried, shellacking the war monument. What you thought was gravy is the pus from our wound, seeping from plate to plate.
Fostering 甘 KAN. ama(eru), ama(ttareru) presume upon, take advantage of, coax. ama(nzuru), ama(njiru) be content with, be resigned to. ama(yakasu) pamper, be indulgent, coddle. ama(i) sweet; honeyed (words); lenient; half‐witted; easy‐going; soft, mild; loose; trashy, sentimental. ama(ttarui) sugary, sentimental. ama‐ sugared, sweet; slightly salted. —from kanji entry 2988
What was I to do with the child thrust upon me after my sister’s death, her husband long gone elsewhere? They presumed upon me. The girl had clearly been coddled as a soft‐boiled egg or a mild sweet like the agar rolls at the confectionery that quiver when the tray is pulled out. Yet how could I not be lenient with this half‐witted five‐year‐old, easy‐going as an ambling cart, sentimental over the loosest trash? So I have learned to use honeyed words, resigned to the truth that sugar brings out sweetness, even in a slightly salted man like me.
Jim Davis
You Are Your Own Voice Said Hephaestus He would like to speak with the master of the Himalayan across the way, barking feverous rackets like thunder or a truck backfiring through a load of rusted scrap. Dinnertime stories fall into the soup bowl where deaf ears float in broth brought home from the mountain well, yarn lost to the chandelier if they’re lucky, spun, the open window where optimism is light enough to unweight their assumption, sufficient wind to carry them into the night, twist about the streetlamp, strangle then the dog. Cedar drawers, they meet at her house because yours or his is still on fire. The pipes have cracked, the nerve button punched and the nerves begin to dance, which is at last a type of fire. He cannot keep track of all his properties – the number of strangled dogs alone is never‐ending. Shriveled and shockingly ugly, he was thrown from Olympus, fell through night and into day, split the clouds and came down with a case of two broken legs—limits of immortality. Mercurial, ugly, and useful, very useful, Hephaestus spent a lifetime trying to be worthy of the gods, there was no time wasted, only the carved shined jewels of his obsession. When she found him finally worthy of her grace she said son I am the language of the fates and he said you are your own voice, I am nothing but the texture of quilted story, endlessly crafting magnificence from accidents improvising what’s emerged from the chaos of the earth. At this they all laughed as a platter of profiteroles was passed around the table. Lime sherbet. A golden tin of cigarettes to burn away the stories as they laughed, as if, in this case the past, although abhorrent and ugly, very ugly, was just the past.
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Hotcakes She ran a radio station in Aurora, spent nights with the bass player in a blues band called Too Cheap to Care. She’s a sometimes hairdresser, he works for TSA, stops daily into the diner for coffee and raisin toast. They met through a realtor who called them both about the briar—we’d sell it by the thorn, he said, if only we could shed the bulk of what we own. In the din of the diner you’d hardly notice his eastern European accent, not until he spoke about his grandchildren and laughed. One of them moved to Holland, eats sardine paste and crackers with cheap wine. This, he said, is a different outlook altogether. From the window you can see the stumps uprooted, tangled undersides, cities of wood lice, earthworms, a kaleidoscope of spiders and their mild poisons. The frenzied, uneven with age and origin, are among the everyday revelatory. She cooked for him once: blue moons of purple boiled potatoes, sautéed with scallions and rosemary. Their story is every story. He remembers which breast he preferred. She wanted to kiss on the Ferris wheel when the fireworks went off, and more. When they paid in coins I believed I was missing my life. His pants were too tight and short on buttons, so he cinched them with a belt and cool nonchalance, you could see the whites of his ankle socks. She was beautiful and small, ready to spit. He coughed. She sang like a canary from his finger. They were in her apartment when the river flooded. When the sun came up the flood became a cloud. No, he said, this is the beginning – you are too beautiful to spill your coffee, which means of course I must be dreaming. Sizzle on the griddle, smoke, pale suns bubble and flip, drown in syrup, pads of butter among the stack. That’s all I ever said, she said, I didn’t mean anything by it, she said, as I held the door and led them out into the rain.
Angela Spofford Fish
Elizabeth caught a fish and she set that fish free, watched it tumble to ocean. Every summer I cast lines to canals, salinity concentrated, my eyes burning upon splash, because there is no closing to water, the world only blur. I have jumped from the dock and I have seen dolphins catching redfish leaping and I have cut my fingers on hooks, salt and blood in my mouth. Two summers ago sand trout flooded the canals, fed by the Laguna Madre, and I kept trout in my freezer for months, driving from Texas to Mississippi with dry ice and a cooler. The fish swarmed the bottom. I will always keep the trout, their shimmer lined along the measuring stick, the water hose rushing pieces of them back to water as splashing, blood and salt. 34
Weld Country In August she’ll grow tomatoes but here is this doormat in dirt, this plot of land at her step, these spilled buttons melting quick. Things have really gone awry. She Nancy Drews her way across the ground, through gravel and grass, a flashlight in one hand. She will find and so she hunches, a shoe undone, dangling, a dragging of her heel. She should see clues here in the soil before the sun sets and the day breaks, long before the boog‐a‐loo, the gypsum, the electric sliding of twilight to dawn and all the lights go out and her flashlight shades to dark. She should land in a neon motel. She should consider what happens when she collects the hair clippings, the letters, the bits of herself and finds something of yours as she crawls back inside the trailer, her arms full and bearing lost pieces.
Jordan Sanderson Struck
Even before the bite, he spent too much time in the artificial light of the shack where they kept snakes at the local zoo, a small operation where people waited for peacock eggs to hatch, waited to see fresh feathers spread out like Aurora Borealis. He liked the temporary blindness of stepping out of the sun and into the room where boas constricted around rats almost too small to squeeze. He said it was like having venom spat into his eyes. Their black tongues, he thought, could taste both worlds. Once, he watched duck eggs waddle in a row down the length of a chicken snake’s body, and he had the urge to be swallowed whole. He was swimming across the Chickasawhay when the cottonmouth sunk its fangs into the back of his thigh. Somehow, he pulled himself onto the bank. When he got out of the hospital, he thumbed through book after book of snake pictures and felt warm as a charmed bird. Although the bite was more punch than caress, he basked in the slow current of the memory of raw, tender mouth encased in scales. It took weeks for the swelling to recede.
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Bolt Even immersed in the most intense pleasure, the face aches and opens, eager to absorb the room’s close air and strained light. Flesh curls around the pit of presence, too immense to clutch or cling. You have jimmied the lock of the self and rush in like a looter, sweeping shelves as if you were the scarcest creature alive. A trespasser in your own territory, you crouch and crawl. The suffering of buzzards fascinates you, their instinct to swoop down on the entrails of a possum like gods to prayers. You say nature’s orderly appearance comes from its compulsions. Unable to pry the boards from the windows of your lover’s old house, you fiddle with what’s left of the screen door, using the frayed wire to scratch a picture of a crow plucking a worm from an ear of corn between the vessels that fork along the pale underside of your arm, just above where you can feel the pulse. Becoming aware of breath, you know only the body is autonomous. It can carry on without you.
Jose Angel Araguz Dandelions
As a child, he looked at them as being made up of the most beautiful dust – when he later heard of man one day returning to dust, he thought it would be like this: a head shaking with a sudden laughter, undone on the wind, dust lifting to the sky, specks outnumbering the stars. 38
40
Fiction
Phong Nguyen Jesus, Unforsaken Whether Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a minor prophet from the Hebrew Bible, was a living man or a composite character from several narrative traditions has long been the subject of theological speculation. The Book of Jesus, following Malachi among the minor prophets, is the primary subject of this speculation. Jewish exegesis holds that Jesus was an Essene, an ascetic reformer who opposed the exclusionary laws of the Pharisees. But
When Jesus invited us
an apocryphal book of the New Judaic school, discovered among the
to his Seder, he said it
Dead Sea Scrolls, suggests that, rather than a reformer of Judaic thought,
would be his last meal
the prophet Jesus envisioned a revolutionary turn in Judaism that would
before the coming
have spawned a new religious tradition around the notion of his
crucifixion, but we had
godhood.
no inkling then that he
From what has been set down in the Judas Scroll—written by the apostle Judas Iscariot—it is clear that Jesus’ aspirations as a prophet exceeded his present place in the Jewish Bible. Excerpts from the Scroll,
had meant for us to be his cannibalizers.
included below, show a Jesus ambitious to die on behalf of humanity, which he otherwise regarded as unreedemably sinful. *** I had just popped the morsel of bread in my mouth when Jesus said it was his flesh. The pulpy mass on my tongue felt suddenly rubbery, and the aftertaste of wine took on a metallic savor, but I continued to chew out of politeness. The bread tasted fishy and thin, transubstantial. When Jesus invited us to his Seder, he said it would be his last meal before the coming crucifixion, but we had no inkling then that he had meant for us to be his cannibalizers. After passing around the winegourd and the platter, Jesus stood up and said, “Take and eat; this is my body.” The glances that stole around our company were like a weaver’s needle, threading every face in the room like a stitch. Nervous sweat pooled on our necks. “And this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for the many forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink of the fruit of 42
this vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”1 What relief! Jesus was only speaking in metaphor. I allowed my jaw to resume its grinding of the bread. I’d known Jesus to renounce drink before, but this statement, with its premonition of death, was uncharacteristic in its morbidity. He seemed so certain of it; we almost believed, with him, that on this night he would be crucified. I had just begun to recover from his announcement, and to partake of the other victuals, when Jesus spoke again. He said, to the twelve of us arrayed at his table, “I tell you, one of you will betray me.”2 I looked around. As I surveyed the faces of Simon, James, Thomas, Thaddeus, Matthew, Simon who is called Peter, his brother Andrew, James and John (the sons of Zebedee), Philip, and Bartholomew, there were many flickering expressions of accusation, guilt, and puzzlement, sometimes passing from one to another in the same face within an instant. I had no mirror, but can only guess that my own countenance bespoke the confusion I felt. Murmurs of “Not me” and “Surely not I” passed from breath to breath. Our Rabbi’s open‐ended accusation left a hot fire of suspicion crackling in the middle of our party, and the smoke that arose from it choked our eloquence. Instead of words, our mouths were all drawn into puckers, mouthing but not pronouncing, “Who?” “The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born.”3 Jesus spoke with softness even as he condemned his betrayer. And I tried to remember, Was it I who dipped his hand into the bowl, or another? To which bowl was he referring? There was a woman with an alabaster bowl, before the supper, who had washed his feet in perfume made from pure nard, but she was not among our company now. What does he mean? Tell me: is it all metaphor, Rabbi Jesus? Our senses slowed and limbs drooping from the wine spirits, but the spirits within us still buoyant, we sang hymns until our voices grew hoarse, and our throats tickled from drink. We stumbled across Kidron Valley, to the Mount of Olives, where surely, we thought, the pure air and bracing cold would sober us. But even in the peaceful starlight of the olive grove, where Jesus had led us, the angels of paranoia were swarming about his head like a plague of insects. 1
Matthew 26:26–29. Matthew 26:21. 3 Matthew 26:23–4. 2
He took Peter aside and put one arm around his shoulder confidentially, saying slurrily, “This very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”4 Peter protested. “I never will. I would die first.” Those gathered nearby echoed those same words in a repetitive chorus, so that the air was not clear of our protestations for several moments. Jesus looked peeringly at his first apostle Peter, then turned away, toward the olive grove. The veiny and bulbous spears of the olive tree grew thickly from the trunks. Roots and rocks overlapped one another on the soil. The fruit of the tree itself ripened purple and testicular from every branch in spite of the cold. Despite the tree’s flowering, the spectral space that surrounded it appeared vaster, more encompassing than anything the desert could produce. Feeling the mood darken, we moved on, guided by Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane, our wobbling feet sore. In Gethsemane, Jesus sank further into the abyss. Seeing him wander that night from darkness to darkness, then settle into that small garden under a new moon, was like watching a man resign himself to quicksand. He asked us to stay behind while he walked off to pray with Peter and the two sons of Zebedee. So we idled in a grassy place, a shady corner of the garden, and, numb with drink, I slunk in the direction of sleep. But in my last waking moments, I swear I saw the savior weeping into his cupped hands, head tilted back, as though drinking of his own tears. When he returned red‐eyed and found us all asleep, he shook us awake. “What are you sleeping for? Couldn’t you keep watch for even an hour?” His eyes darted about, and his brow creased with disappointment; he seemed personally slighted at the thought of our sleeping while he remained awake. “Pray with me, so that we do not fall into temptation.”5 He walked away to pray a second time, and, try as I might to stay awake and keep the vigil with Jesus, my body succumbed to the temptation of sleep. Jesus woke me again, “Can’t you stay awake? Why would you want to sleep on this night of all nights?” He went around shaking the other disciples, until we all sat propped up, bleary‐eyed and red‐ cheeked. He repeated this pattern the night long, suffering from a frantic fear of being the last waking one. 4 5
44
Matthew 26:34. Matthew 26:40–1.
The last time he woke me, he lifted me fully onto my feet. “Are you still sleeping? Look, it’s almost morning, and I’m going to be arrested and crucified at any moment!” I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to console this unraveling god, but how can an apostle comfort his savior? When the sun rose, as if on cue, a crowd came out from the valley, brandishing swords and clubs, calling out Jesus by name. I began to wonder if, after all, the prophecy was true, I would now have to watch Jesus crucified, and if one of us would be to blame. The thought was too horrific to bear: my doubt, his sacrifice, our friendship. I embraced Jesus, throwing myself between him and the mob. But when I pulled back from our embrace, and looked upon Jesus’ face, there was a stern look in his eyes. I realized, too late, that by trying to shelter him from the crowd, I had instead revealed him to it. “Do what
I began to wonder if, after all, the prophecy was true, I would now have to watch Jesus crucified, and if one of us would be to blame. The thought was too horrific to bear: my doubt, his sacrifice, our friendship.
you came for,” he said to me, as though I had given him away—as though it were a betrayal. “No, I . . .” I began to say, but my voice was drowned by the cries of the mob as they swarmed over us. As they pulled Jesus away by the robe, one of our number leapt out, drawing his sword, and sliced off the ear of the high priest’s servant. With his free arm, Jesus stayed the man’s hand, saying, “Put your sword away, for all who live by the sword will die by the sword. I could call on the Lord and he would send
twelve legions of angels to rescue me. But then how would the scriptures be fulfilled?”6 So this was what Jesus had been bracing himself for—fortitude in self‐sacrifice, inhuman in its proportion, divine in nature. All the wandering, the vigils, the drink and the song, the raging in the darkness. It was a cleansing, a preparation for martyrdom. But the nobility of this act was lost on me; as his friend, I saw only the loss of him. No book could ever replace the man. The high priest’s men dragged Jesus behind like a slaughtered calf. He muttered to them as he was being led away, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not arrest me . . .”7 as his voice faded into the distance. 6 7
Matthew 26:52–4. Matthew 26:55.
Every disciple went his own way, feigning indifference to the death of our Rabbi, lest we be seen as his accomplices. So on throughout the day I wondered, Was I Jesus’ betrayer? Was he dying for my sins? The thought was so troubling to my conscience, if I thought it true I might have hanged myself from guilt. The next time I saw Jesus it was at the Festival, and he was being paraded before the crowd, along with another Jesus, named Barabbas. His clothes had been dirtied and shredded, his body bruised and bloodied, but his spirit unbroken. As was the custom on the day of Passover, Pilate stood before the crowd gathered there at the Festival, and made his pronouncement to free one of the two prisoners. “Which of the two prisoners shall I release to you?”8 he asked. The chief priests and the elders went around inciting the crowd to call for the release of Barabbas, but, in desperation, I called out from beneath my hood, before any other could, “Release Jesus Christ!” I repeated the chant, nudging those nearby to take up the chorus. A few did, but the clamor was interspersed with hisses and curses. The two factions competed in the volume of their support. “Release Jesus Barabbas!” the priests shouted, seeking favor within the crowd. “Release Jesus Christ!” I and a smaller number of supporters shouted in return. Pilate spoke again, saying, “This one is a murderer,” pointing to Barabbas with his left hand, and then to Christ with his right: “and this one is a blasphemer, who claims to be the Messiah, the one true King of the Jews. So who shall I let go free?” “Free Jesus!” they shouted in unison. Pilate waved his arms until the din subsided. “Wait,” said Pilate. “There are two Jesuses here: Christ and Barabbas. Which Jesus do you want?” “Barabbas!” they shouted. Pilate’s eyes darted back and forth, surveying the crowd uneasily. “Wait, wait . . .” he said. “Do you mean that you want Barabbas to be freed, or to be crucified?” Seizing my chance, I cried, “Crucify him!” Knowing how difficult it can be to rescind an oath of execution, I meant to incite the crowd to violence. The blood of a murderer was now on my hands. I cried out for his death with whatever was left of me. And, to my endless gratitude, the crowd took up 8
46
Matthew 27:21.
the cry, and took the lesser Jesus away to be tormented. The centurions pushed the Rabbi Jesus from the crowd, where he suddenly appeared frail and mortal again. As I came near him smiling, he looked fiercely upon me, saying, “Judas, your betrayal today is far worse than yesterday. You have taken more than my life; you have stolen destiny from God.” If the Jesus of yesterday had been dreary, paranoid and edgy—today’s Jesus was fearfully blank. He had suffered incommunicable torture and humiliation, and now there was no pain, only the tingling of the nerve to remind him of the presence of his body, which he could scarcely feel. His vow at our last Seder—to swear off wine until his crucifixion day—was broken that very afternoon, when a merchant passed in front of us with bloated wineskins hanging off his handcart. In defense of the Rabbi, it was the heat of the day, and the wine was thick and sweet. Walking among the dunes now, we wandered, as we once did, silently through the land of Israel. We found ourselves entering Golgotha, the crucifixion grounds. How curious that our aimless stroll took us there. Jesus looked enviously at the figures hanging dead or nearly dead from the crucifixes, one after the other, marking the late hour with the long shadows they cast over the sand. Just then, Jesus clutched himself, craning his head skywards, and cried up to the Heavens, “Eli, Eli, lema shamar?”9 He splayed his body out upon a rock, as if to die by a stroke of the divine, but time passed ordinarily, wholly unresponsive to his plea. He lay there quivering, unsmote. Hours upon hours did Jesus lie there, and finally his eyelids did close. I realized that it had been two full days without sleep for the Rabbi, and I stood there watchfully, letting him rest upon his rock. Suddenly the ground began to shake, and the tremors lasted for long enough that the men and women hanging from their crosses started to cry out declarations about God. Jesus awoke, too, long enough to witness a guard look up at the crucifixes and shake his head, saying, “Someone important must have died today, for the earth to shake so in anger.” “It is I,” Jesus wanted to say, I could tell, but the heat of his flesh would have belied him. Toward evening, the other eleven disciples came down to Golgotha, having heard at last the news of Jesus’ salvation. “Where is he? Where is Jesus Christ, our Messiah?” they asked me, looking out onto the rows of the martyred. 9
“My God, my God, why have you spared me?”
He must have changed a great deal in a day. For they did not recognize him lying there with his eyes blissfully closed, peaceful in his sleep. *** Apart from the Judas Scroll, there are few mentions of the prophet Jesus among the apocrypha, suggesting that his influence did not extend beyond the tribes of Israel. Unlike the Book of Jesus, which focusses exclusively on his teachings, the Scroll of Judas emphasizes the story of the prophet himself, and adds to our understanding of those teachings and the role of prophecy in the lives of the ancient Hebrews. Among the prophecies attributed to Jesus are the eschatological, end‐of‐days predictions that he shared in common with the Essenes (the subject of several other Dead Sea Scrolls). Little is known, though, about how Jesus believed the world would end, and where the souls would go when divorced from these bodies. Suggestions for Class Discussion: Why did Jesus believe that God was his Father, who wanted him publicly executed as a human sacrifice? And when it became clear that he would survive, why did he feel that remaining alive would diminish his holiness? What could a dead Jesus have left behind that a living Jesus could not? 48
Constance Squires Wayfaring Stranger Medicine Park, Oklahoma May 18, 2000 It wasn’t exactly rock and roll heaven. Ray Wheeler read the spree of billboards crowded around the exit. Free ATM. Live Bait. Truck Stop. Buffalo Ben’s RV’s. Something about rattlesnakes. He and Martin lowered their visors against the mid afternoon sun as the Jeep shot west. Medicine Park, Oklahoma, was close now, up ahead off Highway 49, which was off I‐44, which was off I‐ 35, which was the road Ray had driven up from Austin that morning and followed north like a mighty river. It hadn’t been a bad drive. Out of the hill country, into the plains, and across the Red River, they had followed the branching, arterial highways with the pleasure of yielding to somebody else’s dull but effective argument. Blasting from the speakers, Lena Wells’s voice kept the horizon receding ahead of them. All day long Martin had played her CD boxed set, Rank Outsider: The Complete Recordings of Lena Wells and the Lighthorsemen, 1977‐1981, and tried to educate Ray on Lena’s career. Martin had grown up a few miles from her home there in Comanche County, Oklahoma, and had a child’s fascination for the beautiful lady in the big old house with the loud rock and roll. He knew all her songs, her lyrics, interpretations of the lyrics, even the deviations sung live and captured on bootleg recordings that he sought out and collected. He unloaded all of it on Ray, lecturing him straight up through Texas, in a voice trembly with pleasure at turning the tables on his former professor. “The month of January shows up on all four albums,” Martin said. “Not many people have noticed that. Also, blue Chevys.” “January,” Ray said. “Blue Chevys. Okay.” These geek’s‐eye‐view details were new to him, but for the most part, he was feigning ignorance for Martin’s sake and knew more about the subject of their upcoming documentary than he let on. Once the Lena Wells project was fait accompli, Ray had done the due diligence. He had hunted on the internet and at the library for anything there was to hear, see, or read. Although he hadn’t yet read the media kit that arrived the day before from Lena’s agent, Katerina Davies, he felt like he knew the dimensions of Lena’s
life, the topography. He had never liked her music. What’s more, he loathed the recent rash of soft‐focus hagiographies dedicated to the played‐out rockers of the 60’s and 70’s. Ordinarily, he would have turned the project down flat. But ordinary was over—he was in some trouble and in no position to say no to a job. Martin said, “I’m just telling you in case.” “In case what?” “In case, I don’t know, that stuff’s important.” “How could it be?” “She could have killed a man in a blue Chevy. She could have a special memory of January.” “Maybe she was cold once in January.” “Ah, go to hell.” Martin worried the frayed brim of his straw porkpie hat. After a minute, he said, “Ray, I know I kind of tricked you into this, but it’s your show now. Besides, you said you thought she could be interesting.” “Maybe.” When Ray imagined the shape of a film about Lena Wells, it didn’t look like a typical rockumentary. He didn’t care much about her private story—the sex, the drugs, the usual. And her rags‐to‐riches rise to fame, it was too Horatio Alger for him, too David fucking Copperfield. He just wondered why she had retired. She only made records for four years. In that time, she had invented a brand of Psychedelic High Plains Rock that was still synonymous with her name twenty years later. She could have gone on making music, at least until the tide turned against her. For most of the eighties and nineties, she had been very uncool, too tied with that seventies wanna‐be‐Indian vibe, that sex‐and‐righteous‐indignation camp that was so easy to laugh at in the more ironic later decades. In the early eighties, when Ray was in college, liking Lena Wells was as verboten as liking the Bee Gees after disco died. It wasn’t that they weren’t good. It was just that they were so—disco. Same thing with Lena Wells and her psychedelic high plains thing. But now, in 2000, Lena was moving into that just‐right category of recherché. Rediscovering her catalogue was a mark of distinction among music fans that prided themselves on championing artists the public has pigeonholed. She had gotten so uncool that she was cool again.
50
Martin shifted in his seat. “Come on, Ray. Every other musician of her stature has at least one documentary about them. At least one. I’m handing you a golden apple.” As the Jeep sped down 49 toward the Wichita Mountain Range, they passed most of what the billboards had promised: a bait‐and‐tackle store, a truck stop, an RV park, while fencing ran along the left side of the road with black and red signs reading “US Military Private Property No Trespassing” spaced at regular intervals along the fence. The other side was lined with short, gnarled blackjacks. There wasn’t much traffic; just a few pick‐ups and cars trailing bass boats.
Feeling like he might have missed their turn, Ray pulled into the gravel parking lot of a turquoise, cinderblock building with a red neon Coors
As the Jeep sped down 49 toward the Wichita Mountain Range, they passed most of what the billboards had promised: a bait-and-tackle store, a truck stop, an RV park, while fencing ran along the left side of the road with black and red signs reading “US Military Private Property No Trespassing” spaced at regular intervals along the fence.
sign flashing in its only window. Across the highway, a defunct water slide was painted the same shade of turquoise. A portable electric marquee standing next to the road said “LeVOn’s Bar‐n‐BaiT” and promised 2 4 1 drAws All daY. They stepped out of the Jeep and into a post‐rain heat haze that gave way, when they walked into the dark store, to refrigerated, drier air and a smell that made Ray think of the ocean. A sports talk radio show leaked out of
a boom box plugged in by the front register. At a pool table covered with a tarp in the middle of the room, two men stood gutting fish. “Hey,” called the taller of the two. He wore a University of Oklahoma baseball cap pulled low over his brow, the soiled bill framing his eyes like parentheses. “We’re a little lost,” Ray said. Martin was scatting out a drum solo as he looked around, taking in the spooky taxidermy. Mounted on the walls were lots of stuffed rattlers, fangs out, catfish the size of the moped Martin drove around Austin, one shaggy buffalo head, and a many‐pointed buck with a sign over his massive antlers that said, “Size Matters.” The animals, the shelves and what was on them; the bottles of sunscreen and bug spray, tins of Vienna sausages and SPAM, everything was coated in a thick layer of greasy dust. “The highway’s due east,” the man in the OU hat said. “If that’s what you’re after.” He had set down his fish and was wiping his hands on a paper towel.
The other man, a barrel‐chested fellow with a long gray beard and oily braids, gave a fierce tug to the skin of the large fish in his hands and ripped it from stem to stern. Martin winced. Ray said, “We’re trying to find Medicine Park. The Reverb Hotel.” “Ah.” The guy in the OU hat ran a hand over his mouth. “You must be the guy that made Barking Mad, that professor. That document—what do you call yourself? Documentarian.” “I’m not a professor.” Not anymore. He managed to stop himself from explaining about his still‐wet identity as a guy without a net, a guy with no teaching salary who was going to have to actually make a living at documentary filmmaking. But OU Hat didn’t look like he was ready for that level of intimacy.
“I’m Ray, this is Martin. Used to be one of my students. He’s my producer now. My
boss.” Hearing himself described as Ray’s boss, Martin gave a self‐effacing wave. “Ooh,” OU Hat wiggled his fingers. “Producer.” Coming around the pool table, he leaned against a barrel filled with ice, soda bottles sticking out like wreckage in a frozen sea. “How do you study about movies, anyway? Hell, if I’d a known you could do that I might a gone to college.” Asshole. Ray smiled at him. “What’s your name?” “Me, I’m Levon, rhymes with heaven. Like the sign out front says: Levon’s Bar‐n‐Bait.” Levon glanced back at his companion with the long braids, who had joined them at the front of the pool table, reeking of fish, a bracing, almost pleasant smell. “I’m Cy,” he said, holding out his wet hand. Ray couldn’t visualize the spelling of his name, heard him say “sigh” and felt how poorly the wistfulness and resignation, the oh‐mercy‐ me quality of the word fit the man. Sigh. Ray took his wet, fishy hand. In a low voice, Cy said, “Want to learn something useful?” Ray leaned closer. “Pardon?” “A useful skill, something Levon here would approve of.” “I—sure. Sure.” Cy reached across the pool table, grabbing the edge of a cocoon of wet newspaper and pulling so that a brown fish thudded from its folds onto the plastic tarp. He picked up the fish by its tail and swung it at Ray. “You ever skin a fish?” 52
Ray let out a loud laugh. The blue chemical smell of the wet newspaper reminded him of summer camps in Big Bend, the indignities of childhood. “No, and that’s only half the story.” The fish swung between them like a pendulum, and Cy smiled. “You sure? You might get hungry later.”
Martin took a step back and fingered the headphones that were perpetually draped
around his neck. Ray saw him fighting a powerful urge to tune out of the scene, tune into the throbbing beat usually leaking from his ears like the heartbeat of some scared animal whose fight‐or‐flight instinct had gotten stuck in the on position. Sometimes Ray would edit reality in his head the way he edited his films. He’d go back to the moment when he said or did something he regretted, or when he didn’t do something he wished he had, and he’d cut that scene. Easy as that. The string of causality would change then, and all would be well. In his head. It was amazing, really, how life could turn on the smallest moments. Pulling into Levon’s Bar‐n‐Bait was beginning to feel like exactly the kind of scene he’d like to edit out. Cy laid the fish back down on the wet newspaper. He hitched up one leg against the pool table, blinking slowly. “You nervous—professor?” he asked. “Nervous?” “About meeting Lena?” Ray was nervous about the aggressive use of fish and the overt display of dead animals in the room. About the inability of anybody to answer a simple question, give some basic directions. He was nervous about a big man with long braids blinking at him like a lizard on a rock, but he was not nervous about meeting Lena Wells. If anything, he felt like he was already on intimate if grudging terms with her. One of his college girlfriends, an intense creature with pale‐pink nipples who was always saying how symbolic everything was, had made a Mix Tape for the him the first time they had sex and had crammed it full of Lena Wells songs. He had hated her for it, hated her for being disappointed when he came before the second chorus of “What the Thunder Said,” and had always irrationally blamed Lena Wells for his lack of staying power. So maybe he harbored the irrational idea that Lena Wells owed him something. But nervous? Not really. “I am,” Martin said.
“She makes me nervous,” Levon volunteered, raking his hat back and forth over his head. “Always has. Ever since high school. I sat behind her in Social Studies. She come in here a few times over the years. Sold her a Coke once. It wasn’t no big thing. Sold her a Coke. Made small talk, hot enough for you, we need rain, that kind of thing. She gave me a five. I gave her some change. It wasn’t no big thing. I reminded her about Social Studies. She said she hated high school. But not me—she didn’t say she hated me.” He looked off, seemed to relive the scene. Ray made a mental note to come back with his camera and ask Levon to say it all again. The story had the well‐worn counters of frequent telling. Levon continued, “Nobody ever thought she’d be back. Then some months after she had that meltdown on TV, somebody up and bought the Medicine Park Inn. That place was boarded up since the 50’s. Who bought it? Why, Lena Wells. She showed up with that new baby, had her whole band with her.” Cy stepped behind the bar and lathered up his hands and forearms in the sink. They watched as the man cleaned and rinsed his hairy arms. Ray was struck by his complete absorption. Most people can’t forget they’re being watched, but Cy seemed accustomed to concentrating in the presence of others. It was almost embarrassing, watching him towel off. Finally, he said, “You can come with me. Like Levon said, it’s right close.” Beside him, Ray felt Martin’s body release tension like a punctured balloon. They followed Cy, watching his long braids hit his back like whips as they emerged from the dark bar, back into the white light of the hot May day. Cy climbed onto an old black BMW motorcycle with a sidecar that stood in the shade of the building and roared across the parking lot kicking up gravel. He motioned for them to follow. Martin muttered, “Sure, let’s follow this guy.” Cy had swung his bike in front of them. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and when he turned and waved, the wind lifted his gray hair and suddenly, Ray knew who he was, his profile recalling one of live television’s rawest moments, the night in 1981 when Lena Wells effectively ended her career by spacing out on The Tonight Show. Ray had been in El Paso with his parents, a hungry teenager walking through the living room on his way to the kitchen for a late‐night snack. He paused behind the couch to see who the musical guest was and recognized Lena Wells and the Lighthorsemen. Lena and her band looked too road‐weary to stand before the shimmering topaz and pink curtains, seemingly airbrushed in from a windier, dustier reality. They were about a minute into “Rare Weeds.” Lena 54
stood under the lights in a blue suede halter top, sweating, her skin greasy like she hadn’t bathed that day. She grabbed the mic, curtain of black hair falling across her face and concealing the crisis for a moment even as her voice faltered and stopped.
Stopped. Ray had grabbed the back of the couch, feeling the momentum of the song surge into an abrupt hush.
Then the camera got up under her hair somehow, went close on her black-rimmed eyes and it was like they were portals into the Real, some inchoate timeless deep, around which the bright artificiality of the show turned shabby.
Ed McMahon’s big laugh, designed to fill the odd spot of broadcasting silence, sounded, then sounded again, the second time with a downbeat of dread. The Lighthorsemen tried to loop back and play the chorus again so she could jump in. The camera cut to Johnny Carson, but he looked nervous, so it cut away. Silence spread like a stain. Then the camera got up under her hair somehow, went close on her black‐rimmed eyes and it was like they were portals into the Real, some inchoate timeless deep, around
which the bright artificiality of the show turned shabby. Ray and his mother and his father said out loud the lyrics that should have come next, giving each other surprised glances as their voices rang out simultaneously. All across America, people shouted the words at their television, cryptic lyrics that were on every car radio that summer: If they said you were a flower Then you wouldn’t interest me But instead they all insist you are One of the rarest weeds Everybody remembered the words but Lena. Later, global transient amnesia became the official diagnosis, but in the moment everybody knew it was the drugs. From the couch, Ray’s mother said, “That girl is lost,” and took a long drag on her cigarette. As the silence held, Ray wanted to snatch the afghan that covered his mother’s legs and throw it over the television to hide the shame they were witnessing. Where was the cut to commercial?
Then, hope. A new sound and the camera found Cy’s serrated profile, offering redemption with the austere yet soulful expression of a frontier minister who has been called upon for far too many funerals. There he was on lead guitar, sidewinding into “Wayfaring Stranger.” And singing, the agony in his eyes unfit for television. Ray realized that he was changing the words of the old traditional number, from “I” to “she.” She’s just a poor, wayfaring stranger a travelin’ through this world alone. What ensued was musical triage. The drummer and bass player joined in, a topshelf laugh boomed from Ed McMahon and a cut to Johnny Carson showed him pulling a face, like, “All righty, then!” Whatever Lena was doing stayed out of view of the television audience, but you could tell that Cy was staring at her as he sang. There was not another screen shot of her until the second verse. Then she was there, her voice surging in like turbo drive with I'm going there to see my mother She said she'd meet me when I come Cy’s face lit up for a moment then he looked down at his fingers moving over the frets of the guitar. I'm only going over Jordan I'm only going over home They brought the song to a rousing close, and the cameras showed the studio audience on their feet, but still nothing could make it look like a deliberate performance. There was just no denying that silence, a rend in the fabric of Tonight Show time, a bullet hole blown in the chest of Tuesday night. Lena had lost it and everybody saw. When the song was over, Carson went straight to Cy, shaking his hand with what looked to Ray like honest‐to‐God gratitude. Ray had just shaken that same hand, cold and wet and fishy. Ray turned to Martin and said, “Do you realize who that is?” “Who?” “Him—grizzly guy up there.” “He looks familiar.”
“Cy. Think about it. Cyril Dodge? Haven’t you been playing him all day?” Ray punched
the CD player to “Rank Outsider,” Lena’s first hit, and turned it up. The beginning was a lead guitar riff so ubiquitous any school kid in America could hum it, even if they didn’t know who played it. “Him.” 56
Martin glanced from Cy, ahead of them on his bike, to the CD player like he was trying to match the man to the sound. “Jesus! ” He smacked the dashboard with his palm. “Of course. Cyril Dodge! How did you figure that out and I didn’t?” They followed him as he veered right. Hot as it was, Cy wore a leather vest to ride. Across the back it said Red Dirt Sober Bikers and had Lena Wells lyrics on the bottom half stitched in red and purple: Heavy heavy blues As my feathers are light Midnight of the morning Of American night Ray read the lyrics out loud and said, “I know those words.”
“You just heard them,” Martin said, turning up the music. “Listen.”
James Brubaker Three Television Shows About Familial Love 1 | A Father’s Love This elimination‐style, reality television show finds several contestants competing for the love of a father. This is neither the actual father of any of the contestants, nor an almighty Father—it is simply a man who happens to be a father. The contestants compete in challenges such as making breakfast for The Father, buying Father’s Day gifts for The Father, playing sports with The Father, working on car engines with The Father, bathing The Father, bringing The Father his pornographic magazines when he is in the bathroom, reading the newspaper to The Father, massaging The Father’s feet, bringing home an appropriate significant other who pleases The Father, agreeing with The Father’s
At the conclusion of each episode, The Father selects one contestant and dismisses him or her by saying, “I’m very disappointed in you.”
political beliefs, appreciating the significance of The Father’s generation’s contributions to society, making things out of wood for and with The Father, not telling anyone when you see The Father ogle waitresses, cleaning The Father’s collection of Civil War memorabilia, painting a cubist portrait of The Father, siding with The Father when he talks about all the times his wife cheated on him, carving dice out of bone for The Father, and helping The Father inside and to bed when he comes home drunk and throws up on the porch. At the conclusion of each episode, The Father selects one contestant and dismisses him or her by saying, “I’m very disappointed in you.” In the pilot episode, the contestants are invited to a formal dinner where they meet The Father for the first time. There is no formal contest in this first episode, but The Father decides to dismiss a male contestant who refrains from ordering an alcoholic beverage despite The Father’s insistence. After the young man leaves the dinner table, The Father says, “Never trust a man who won’t drink with you. Men like that, they will always find ways to make you feel bad about yourselves.” The show’s finale features the final three contestants eulogizing The Father at a mock funeral, after which The Father selects the son or daughter he loves most as the winner. 58
2 | Clanking Replicator In this quirky sitcom, ED‐209 is a lonely robot living in a society of fruitful self‐replicating robots. While the robots around him—namely ED‐208 and ED‐210—have self‐replicated entire units of fellow robots with which to work and live, ED‐209 has been unable to replicate a single companion. The series follows ED‐209 as he works at a factory making replacement parts for robotic pets, spends time with his support group for non‐replicating, self‐replicating robots, and seeks companionship among his neighbors. In the pilot episode, ED‐209 spends an afternoon with ED‐208 and some of its replicated offspring—ED‐208a, ED‐208d, and ED‐208i. When ED‐ 209 makes a tasteless joke about RepRaps and their non‐autonomous self‐replication, ED‐208 chastises ED‐209 for obscuring his own insecurities by belittling others. ED‐208 says, “01010011 01100101 01101100 01100110 00101101 01110010 01100101 01110000 01101100 01101001 01100011 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100001 01101101 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100001 01101100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01101001 01110100 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01101111 01100011 01101001 01100101 01110100 01111001 00101100 00100000 01100001 01110101 01110100 01101111 01101110 01101111 01101101 01101111 01110101 01110011 00100000 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00001010.” The robot’s words are subtitled on the bottom of the screen as, “Self‐replication is a fundamental necessity of our society, autonomous or not.” ED‐208d adds, spoken in binary but subtitled as always, “Those who cannot self‐replicate endanger our culture.” When ED‐209 protests, ED‐208i says, “When ED‐208 ceases to function, we, his replications, will go on. When we cease to function, the replications we make will go on.” Upset by its encounter with ED‐208 et al, ED‐209 visits ED‐210 and asks for help learning how to self‐replicate. Under the guidance of ED‐210, ED‐ 209 makes several attempts at self‐replication. These attempts include building a robot with its outsides on its inside and its insides on its outside, building a robot with a cinder block where its head should be, building a robot with component parts made of brittle glass, and building a robot by fusing a central intelligence data processor to a living bird. These attempts are largely unsuccessful, though the robot‐bird hybrid displays a brief flicker of artificial life, which causes ED‐209 to feel a glimmer of hope that it will someday be able to participate in the self‐ replication upon which the continuation of robotic society relies.
3 | Old Folks A sitcom in which Ross and Jane, a couple in their seventies, come to terms with late‐in‐life independence after their children and grandchildren stop visiting them. The pilot episode opens with Ross calling his adult children and inviting them over for dinner. Each invitation is met with a negative response, ranging from a simple, “No thanks,” to the more colorful, “You know we can’t visit because your age is a constant reminder of mortality, and every time we leave your house, our children can’t sleep because they are afraid of death.” After their invitations are refused, Ross and Jane decide to go out for a night on the town to try to recapture something of their youth. Unfortunately, they find that the restaurants and clubs they used to frequent have long closed. After a montage of jokes about Ross’s bad driving and the couple’s attempt to find an early bird dinner, Ross and Jane decide to visit a new bar called Vue. After waiting thirty minutes for a server, Ross goes to the bar to order drinks, but it is too dark and loud for him to read the price list, and he orders drinks that far exceed the amount of money he has in his wallet. Without credit cards, Ross is unable to pay for the drinks. Embarrassed by the situation, Ross retrieves Jane from their table, and the couple return home where they talk about friends and favorite stars who have died. Ross proposes that he and Jane are useless, and that maybe all the couple has left is to wait for death. Jane disagrees and suggests that, just because so many of their friends and favorite stars are dead, and just because their family and the world have left them behind, does not mean they are obsolete. The episode ends with Ross and Jane saying goodnight to pictures hanging on their bedroom walls of their children and grandchildren, then kissing each other on their mouths, and settling into sleep in their individual beds, just a few feet apart from each other in their master bedroom.
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Rob Roesnch In the Dark On the first day back from Easter break, Vicky Goggins, the girls’ Varsity volleyball coach, was not in her usual chair in the faculty dining room. Daniel Lash, who taught English, noticed this; he considered himself a noticer. Like him, she was younger than thirty and never spoke at meetings so, even though she sat at a table with the other P.E. teachers and Daniel sat alone, with a book, at the little table sometimes used as a place to set left‐over birthday cake, he felt a kinship with her. Though they had never discussed it, Daniel imagined she would understand why he never participated in the conversation.
It was not that the other teachers at St. Luke’s were awful people, Daniel saw. They cared
for their students—at least for the ones who behaved. They were cheerful volunteers even for such drudgery as the phone‐a‐thon. They dressed up to chaperone the spring dance. Many had children of their own who they spoke of with honest pride and honest worry; they knew what was happening in their children’s lives, and they knew what was happening in their students’ lives. In their rooms after school they talked with students about numbers or French verbs or five‐paragraph essays, willing as hired carpenters.
What got to Daniel was not how they lived or who they were—it was what they talked
about: TV shows, new restaurants, Beltway traffic and, around election season, whatever platitude or slip‐of‐the‐tongue was that day in the news. No thinking at all, he would tell his wife. Just white noise. He wanted to go back to grad school.
But he was too proud to eat alone at his desk in his room, as some did—he was not a
squirrel, he would say to his wife after her response of “so don’t eat in there” to his detailing of another deadening overheard lunch conversation. “So don’t listen,” she would say, half‐listening to him, trying not to think about work or about their months‐long failure to conceive a child, letting herself sink into the green slicing of the knife through the carrots or onions or potatoes on the perfect solid oak cutting board that she congratulated herself every day for adding to their wedding registry. “How could I not listen?” he would say.
Ted Bonner, who taught math and was in charge of the Eucharistic ministers for every
Mass, had also noticed Vicky’s absence; he considered himself a people person and made it a habit to keep a map in his head of the locations of the other people in a room. Entering, he had
also noticed Daniel’s presence, though when he had smiled and nodded in Daniel’s direction the young teacher had not even looked up from his book. Ted Bonner was, despite himself, suspicious of Daniel, as many of the other teachers were, though none would go so far as to refer to him as strange or even odd—he was dedicated, or so serious, or quiet. Ted Bonner could not for the life of him quite understand why anyone would want to so isolate himself in a place like St. Luke’s. Here the students were bright; the work was interesting; the soccer fields out back were lovely, long and soft and green; the conversation with peers was full of cheer and fellow‐ feeling; Jesus had risen from the dead (he remembered most days).
Mattie O’Donnell, who had been at the school long enough to recognize the bad
dispositions of parents in their children and had taught Columbus‐to‐Lincoln American history so many times she did not ever need to open the textbook, imagined she understood Daniel Lash perfectly: he thought he was too smart for St. Luke’s. He went home every day and laughed about it on the phone with his friends in New York City. She imagined she understood Ted Bonner—he wanted to be a principal and planned for the future with even his tiniest gesture— the way the corners of his lips turned up when he asked if anyone else wanted coffee. She did not believe in assigned seats in the lunch room, and sat where she pleased and made conversation; she sat in Vicky’s chair; she had not noticed Vicky’s absence.
Vicky Goggins was not in the lunch room because she had resigned the day before, more
or less against her will, via a phone call with the headmaster. She was pregnant; she was keeping the baby; she would soon be showing; she was unmarried. *** There was no decision to be made as to whether or not Vicky could continue teaching at St. Luke’s—the headmaster’s responsibility as the head of a Catholic high‐school was clear. Even so, as soon as he had hung up the phone he had had visions of the hand‐raising outrage of an emergency full‐faculty meeting. He saw the glasses clenched in the trembling hand of the librarian who went to church every day; he saw the untucked shirt of the new history teacher who was always proposing field trips to the city as he stood to demand involving the students themselves in the discussion.
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In any case, he had to somehow inform the faculty. They were the voice of the school, like it or not. If word slipped out to the students it would be the wrong word, and different versions would fly around the cafeteria and then to the dinner tables, and his phone would never stop ringing. The headmaster saw that perhaps it could be called cowardly to farm the task out to the department chairs, but he did not, after five long years on the job, care. He had lived for a whole year in a South American jungle and survived a bite from a poisonous snake; he had once believed in his heart of hearts that management theory was only for people who did not trust in God.
So, just after lunch, the announcement for the department meetings was made. At the
end of the day, instead of heading straight home for an hour or two with a novel before his wife arrived, Daniel Lash sat at his desk listening to the building empty. Like a ship pulling away from port, he thought. Soon all the students were elsewhere except for the girls’ track team dashing from room to room looking for tape to hang up posters on lockers. (It was always vaguely unsettling for Ted Bonner to see his female students out of uniform in only T‐shirts and those new shiny shorts, soft as pajamas, so he always made sure to frown.) When even the track girls were away in the world, the various departments were assembled by the department chairs in their various homes—the math department in a room with nothing on the walls and all the desks gleaming and clean of marks; the science department perched on stools in a room that smelled of bleach; the history department in an orange room where the chairs had been arranged into a lumpy circle; the English department at the big table in their office under the poster of Shakespeare Andy‐Warhol style; the religion department spread out among the first few pews of the chapel amid the late afternoon light through the stained glass‐the most beautiful light of the day, one teacher said before the meeting began, and another replied “what a shame we are never here at this time as a community, to just sit and breathe and be.”
Most faculty members took the news placidly—it was the end of the day and they wanted
to leave, though it was not unpleasant to be in on a secret. Those who were disposed to react to such news with anger at the administration for the callous dismissal of a good‐hearted young woman or with anger at today’s society for leading young people into error could then say their pieces to a group of close colleagues who knew exactly what was coming and who could listen placidly or nod or turn their heads and roll their eyes as fit their dispositions.
In general, whatever each individual teacher’s feelings about the administration or
society, there was less talk of disappointment or sin or poor example than there was of community and forgiveness; at a minimum everyone seemed agree implicitly on the great value of their selfless feelings. By four o’clock there was nothing more to say—the news was no longer new, what was happening had happened, the built‐up steam of teacher‐self‐righteousness had been vented, just as the headmaster had hoped. Furthermore, if anyone had a burning desire to make themselves heard by the headmaster his office was closed for the day—he was attending a conference with other heads of other private religious schools at the Marriott downtown. As the news was being delivered to his teachers he was listening to a retired priest explicating a few lines about Christ the teacher, about the care He took to craft the lesson into language his loved students could take into their lives. The headmaster sometimes wished he had never become more than a teacher. He found his attention wandering—I am still like a student, he thought. The retired priest’s bottle of water, which was provided for all the speakers, was flavored with artificial grapefruit. The bottle was unopened and it would stay unopened, the headmaster knew— Catholics were used to speaking without needing to wet their throats. The headmaster imagined the messages stuffing up his voice mail. He thought about taking off his shoes. He was not, truth be told, particularly worried about what was going to happen to Vicky Goggins.
Very few were particularly worried about Vicky Goggins. The unconscious consensus was,
more or less, that yes Vicky Goggins was unmarried, and pregnant, but on the other hand she had a college degree and her parents had been wealthy enough—one was some sort of lawyer— to send her to St. Luke’s in the first place. There were other jobs in the world. She would be okay “in the long run.” Not that her life would not change. Maybe there’d be a year or two in her parent’s third bedroom, maybe she’d find her friends drifting away, maybe she’d start to worry if she would ever date again, whether she’d ever again feel what she felt the previous summer a little too drunk with her feet in the dark swimming pool, talking with the shadow of a smooth‐ shouldered young man who smelled like smoke. But she’d date again; she’d meet someone at the library, on the internet, at church. Other women had babies and cared for them; women had babies; she was not a charity case.
All the same, more than a few teachers who had some contact with her, even if only
glancing (a conversation about the rain, a sharing of a moment of teaching success at the faculty 64
retreat, a joke about knees at the faculty/student basketball game) went so far as to call her that afternoon, meaning to see how she was and to offer vague promises of future aid. All ended up leaving these promises on her voice mail. They stood ready if needed.
Ted Bonner, one of the message‐leavers, decided that night after beef stroganoff and
before Law and Order to sit down and compose a letter. His wife wandered back into the kitchen at eight o ‘clock, when they had usually just finished their hour of news, and remarked on the care he was taking with his handwriting. He found himself writing about the birth of his first daughter. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he wrote, then paused, and looked at it, and thought why on earth would I want to tell Vicky that? He remembered how cold it was, how he stood just outside the hospital doors feeling the sweat freezing on his face, eating a candy bar—the first thing he’d eaten all day—and watching his breath in the dark. That weird warm tiny purple‐blue creature was his flesh and blood. He wasn’t excited, exactly; he wasn’t afraid. He felt warm
That weird warm tiny purple-blue creature was his flesh and blood. He wasn’t excited, exactly; he wasn’t afraid. He felt warm and strange.
and strange. He closed his eyes and tried to say a Hail Mary but he couldn’t remember the second part; silent night, holy night kept popping into his head. He felt that he did not have control of his thoughts. He imagined simply walking away; how hard could it be to steal a car? He wished it was not overcast. He
held the door open for a man his age carrying a small pale woman in a white nightgown and winter coat.
He thought of the day his daughter fell out of the tree in the yard she had been warned
against climbing, how she ran to him screaming with her wrist wrong and how he knelt in the wet grass and held her, and how hot her skin was, and how he could not himself stop crying.
He tore up what he had written and wrote another letter, much shorter, in five minutes.
He ended the new letter with “I will keep you in my prayers” and his email address.
Mattie O’Donnell did not bother with a phone call—after the department meeting she
dug out her copy of the faculty directory from the bottom of the mess of her drawer in the department file cabinet and found the Vicky’s address and drove right there. A townhouse complex near the Beltway. She did not pause to consider whether or not Vicky would appreciate a visit—if another human being was in trouble and you could help, you helped. It was simple. If someone was doing something wrong, you said so. It was what her mother had always done. If
there was a sick baby down the street, you walked down the street with a dish of hot food and you knocked on the door and entered and began to clean. When that baby grew to a boy who stood together with a knot of boys around the side of the grocery store making monkey business and sneaking cigarettes, you told that boy you would tell his mother, and then you told his mother. And when your mother died that boy would come to the funeral and he would be a responsible man in a neat black suit with a family of his own.
Mattie knocked on the front door three times. (She did not know she had an unusually
sharp knock.) After a few seconds, there was a shuffling around in the hallway beyond the door, though the door did not open. A few seconds later the door was finally opened not by Vicky but by a young woman in sweatpants and a ponytail holding a phone, chewing gum. She did not so much as say hello. Mattie almost simply pushed past her.
“Is Vicky upstairs?” she said.
“Who are you?” said the girl, who was clearly not a St. Luke’s girl.
“I’m a teacher at her school,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“She’s not here,” said the girl. The girl was lying, Mattie saw. She imagined that she could
always tell when her students were lying.
“Will you go upstairs and tell her that I’m here?” said Mattie.
“She’s not here,” said the girl.
“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult,” said Mattie. And the girl closed the door
right in her face. Mattie could hear numbers being entered into the phone as the girl retreated into the house. Young people today were missing some part of their souls, Mattie decided again. Still, Vicky needed her help‐‐Vicky was a good girl, for the most part. She should have known to come to her for help. They’d talked about the beaches of New Jersey; they’d talked about the Irish Tenors.
That night Mattie O’Donnell could not concentrate on the new Abraham Lincoln
biography. She could already hear the voices in the faculty dining room in her head. Those people only pretended to be Christians.
She fell asleep angry on the pink flowery sofa and awoke with a start to a bunch of does in
the backyard, as if one had spoken to her before bending down to nose the grass. Mattie watched the deer and was careful to breathe quietly, as if they would hear her through the sliding glass door. As someone who had grown up in the city she was still a little bit afraid of 66
deer, their human‐sized eyes. Her neighbors were worried about their landscaping; there was talk of calling in hunters.
She was just about to stand and knock on the glass to shoo them but then did not, and
instead stood with her nose nearly touching the glass, watching. *** In the morning, just as Mattie had imagined, the “usual suspects” assembled around the big table in the faculty dining room. There was the usual joke about decaf or high‐test, a general ooh‐ing over a box of donut holes—the morning seemed ordinary enough, though the words about Vicky were in the air, waiting to slip in.
“Have you seen John this morning? He must be buried under messages,” was offered to
general nodding, and the topic was opened.
“It must be difficult for the girls on the team,” said Diane Wiscowski, seizing the moment,
stirring her tea. She was always stirring her tea. She was not concerned about what impression she gave, but only about what was right and true. (She refused to even accept papers that misspelled authors’ or characters’ names and, when asked by terrified students to send college recommendation letters, produced pages of beautifully turned, persuasively detailed sentences that the students themselves would never be allowed to read).
Ted Bonner found himself agreeing with Diane, up to a point. He had not sent the letter,
and instead planned to find a quiet moment over the next few days, after the chatter had calmed down, to sit down with someone in PE and see how she was getting by, if there was anything he could do. It was true Vicky should have made better choices. It was true he did not know her very well at all.
“They’ll be fine—they’re a good group of girls,” said Ted Bonner.
“She was someone they looked up to,” continued Diane. “It’s not fair to them.”
“No,” said Ted Bonner. “Of course it’s not.”
“She seemed like such a responsible person,” said someone else.
“She was always a little wild,” said someone else.
The door to the faculty room opened and Ted Bonner, his back to the door, sensed a change in the space and watched Diane stirring her tea and pointedly not looking up. It was Mattie O’Donnell. Ted turned to say hello, but she was already looking directly at him.
“Now don’t you all look pleased with yourselves,” she said in the same tone she used with
students who claimed to have misunderstood homework assignments.
“I’m not sure what you mean, Mattie,” said Ted Bonner calmly—he knew exactly what she
meant. He considered himself a generous person but often had to work to keep a rising bitterness out of his face whenever Mattie spoke to him.
As a Catholic teacher at a Catholic high school, he had once felt free to praise the
initiative of a few students in his homeroom who’d taken time out of their own weekends and afternoons to plan a trip to the pro‐life march in Washington; moreover, he had been careful not to censure or criticize directly any of those students who did not participate, or those who believed strongly that true gender equality (which he also believed in) required complete reproductive freedom—he was not their priest or their father, and he believed that respect for the democratic process meant respect for other points of view, so he was stung when a student complained to him of Mattie’s disparaging comments about the pro‐life march, and, more particularly, Mattie’s statement that men should not have a vote on the matter one way or the other; especially not the men who teach here. Ted was sure Mattie had said worse but, as a matter of principle, never allowed a student to complain about another teacher in his earshot.
“Oh you know exactly what I mean,” said Mattie, coming into the room, feeling her eyes
burning. All his simpering courtesy—it was never true. True kindness was never simply polite but direct and sometimes difficult. When you didn’t say what was true your insides got all twisted up. In any case, it was better to be hated openly than to wonder and worry how others were feeling.
Still, Mattie O’Donnell was not above being flustered, and soon enough she found herself
standing directly in front of the closed refrigerator with no thought in her head of what tangible task she had come into the faculty dining room to perform.
Daniel Lash, at his little table, had, at first, pretended to not be paying attention. He had
his copy of the Brit Lit textbook open to the section on Romantic poets that he was preparing for the day—he’d taught the section five times already and had, even before that, known the Romantics backwards and forwards—he’d written his undergrad thesis on water imagery in 68
Wordsworth‐‐but he liked to look over everything carefully each year. He told his classes that he learned something new each time, which wasn’t quite true—he enjoyed the poems more, perhaps, but he was never persuaded to, for example, accept a different interpretation of a line. He became more and more helplessly frustrated by his students’ obstinate refusal to swoon over the poems’ beauty and worth. You were like that too, once, he told himself; you once had girls and baseball games and beer on your mind and in your heart. You were like them once, he told himself each year and each year felt its truth less and less. At first he was staring at a drawing of a nightingale, and then, when Mattie came in, he looked out the window at the stream of silver and black shiny vehicles—kids being dropped off on the way to the office, on the way to yoga—and he noticed how none of the kids nor the occasional trudging teacher looked away from the school out over the traffic to the knot of trees between St. Luke’s and the street where the leaves were just coming into bud, and, where, at least from where he sat, you could make out two new nests, not too high up, in crooks. A mother bird darted out of one. In those tufts, tiny desperate sharp yellow mouths. Maybe one perfect speckled still‐unhatched egg.
He was sure that his wife’s failure to get pregnant was his fault. He saw he had been
listening hard, almost hoping for a bitter word from the big table about Vicky Goggins, a note of scorn for violating Jesus’ pregnancy rules. That she was pregnant was somehow not fair. What an awful thing to think, he saw. What sort of person had he become?
Daniel then turned to watch Ted Bonner watch, with a perfectly blank face, Mattie
O’Donnell stand in front of the refrigerator, her face clenched, staring hard at the lunch calendar taped to the front of the refrigerator.
Seconds passed.
“I’m sorry, Mattie,” said Ted Bonner finally. “But I’m afraid you’ve got me in the dark.”
When Mattie turned to face the big table she did not know what she was going to say but
she felt that she was ready to say whatever was going to come out of her mouth about how wrong it was to cast a person out of their community; Ted Bonner waited and readied to calmly reply something along the lines of caring for the effects of the moral atmosphere of the school on their students did not mean that everyone there did not also care for Vicky and for the new child; Daniel Lash imagined interrupting and saying something like “Thank God she doesn’t
have to listen to you two anymore,” knowing he would no more stand and speak than he would smash through the window into the day.
Then Vicky Goggins herself came into the room.
She was wearing jeans and gray sweatshirt so shapeless that, if you didn’t know she was pregnant, you wouldn’t have guessed. On her feet were new, old‐lady‐mall‐walker white sneakers, nothing like the webby crosstrainers or hiking sandals the other teachers would have imagined her in. She looked like she had not slept well.
There was Daniel Lash in his back corner,
Ted Bonner did not at first see Vicky—his imagination believed she
book open before him
had been erased from St. Luke’s. For an instant she was a mother
and his mouth open
here to help the Booster club stuff envelopes; she was a substitute
like he was about to
teacher. He only saw her when her eyes settled on his face for a
say something. He
moment and, when he did not react, drifted away. Daniel Lash was not surprised that she did not turn her head to catch his eye; he waited for someone at the big table to tell her she shouldn’t have come in when there were students around
always seemed like he was about to say something.
but no one said anything until Mattie barked “There you are!” The door behind Vicky Goggins settled closed, and she could not make herself step confidently through the room, as she had imagined the night before and on the car ride over, right through all of them to the refrigerator to retrieve her week‐old pasta‐and‐vegetables in the Tupperware snapcase she’d meant to borrow, not steal, from her mother, no matter what her mother said. She made mistakes, yes, everyone did. She had forgotten the Tupperware; she was pregnant. But she would be responsible for what she did.
As she had seen it, there was no point in waking up very early or waiting until the day was
over to retrieve her mother’s Tupperware. She’d worked at the school for five years; it could cope with five more minutes of the pressure of her feet.
The problem was the instant she stepped into the faculty dining room and Ted Bonner
looked up and Mattie spotted her she was again a student, a stupid girl, a child.
“I am here,” she managed after a moment. Diane stopped stirring her tea. In the quiet
Vicky heard some boys in the hall fiddling with their locks and knocking on their lockers—this heavy green childlike clanging that she’d heard every morning for years. The room waited. 70
“Vicky, are you doing okay?” said Ted Bonner. “Is there something we can do to help
you?”
“No,” she said, recovering. “No.” She told her legs to step forward to the refrigerator, and
they did. She felt eyes settling on her spine, like horseflies. Mattie moved aside for her as she opened the refrigerator and collected the mushy white pasta in the Tupperware and said goodbye in her mind to the things in the refrigerator: goodbye to the “family‐size” ketchup and goodbye to the French Vanilla flavored non‐dairy creamer that had been there since Christmas. As the refrigerator’s door closed, Mattie O’Donnell’s hands were on her shoulders. Vicky felt the muscles in her shoulders clench, as if she was about to throw a punch.
“Vicky, you don’t listen to anything anyone says, okay? You trust yourself. Now, where
can we go to talk this through?”
“I guess I came here because I wanted to say goodbye,” she said.
Mattie nodded vigorously.
“No,” said Vicky, taking a step back. “I mean, I think, a real goodbye.” Mattie O’Donnell
kept nodding and she did not let her hands drop to her sides but clasped them, suddenly, like a punished child trying to show she was listening.
Vicky Goggins took a last look out at the faculty dining room. There was Daniel Lash in
his back corner, book open before him and his mouth open like he was about to say something. He always seemed like he was about to say something.
“I guess I should have come earlier this morning,” she said. They were the last words
these people would ever hear her say. It was a strange thought. The color of the formica tables— a sort of leathery purple—was strange, and the pattern of cracks in the top corner of one of the windows was strange—from, maybe, a lost bird? a thrown stone? something altogether different? Everything these days was more and more strange, she thought, as she walked through the faculty dining room and through the door and closed the door behind her and closed those eyes to her life.
How strange to think about what they could be thinking and seeing and saying.
Outside the light was a good, ordinary morning light and she was free in it, insanely free.
She was a student and walking out into the school parking lot halfway through a school day because maybe her mother was picking her up to take her to the dentist—it seems impossible to be allowed to be outside, yet she is outside.
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Reviews & Interviews
Ashley Galan
A Review of Stuart Youngman “Sy” Hoahwah’s Night Cradle and Velroy and the Madischie Mafia
One of only a handful of poets to come from the Comanche Nation Tribe, Sy Hoahwah has been described as the next generation of young native poet‐prophets by author Joy Harjo. Many of his poems find settings in Southwest Oklahoma, where he has close family ties. Hoahwah’s writing pays homage to the stories, traditions and superstitions of the Comanche Tribe and incorporates aspects of these into his poetry in a way that is uniquely his own, while at the same time accessible to everyone. His poetry collections, Velroy and the Madischie Mafia and Night Cradle both eloquently combine the gritty reality of life as a Native American with supernatural elements. His work tends to challenge any preconceived notions about today’s Native Americans while at the same time honoring those natives that have come before him.
In the first poetry collection, titled Velroy and the Madischie Mafia, much of the poetry’s
settings take place in Comanche County and vividly paints a portrait of a land riddled with drug use combined with Native traditions and ghosts. Hoahwah’s creative use of old tribal folklores adds to the mystique of his supernatural ghost stories. One poem titled, “Colors of the Comanche Nation Flag,” is one in particular that puts the tribal folklore of the “Mupits,” “Deer Woman” and “Coyote Superstition” to use, exploring them in a way that adds dramatic effect to his ghost stories and bringing these folklores to a wider audience. His writing in this collection accurately and artfully portrays life and events of young Native Americans as depicted in the first poem, “Madischie Mafia.” Hoahwah does not shy away from the grittiness of life and drug use, but instead uses it as a tool to reconstruct ideas and break common stereotypes.
The poems in Hoahwah’s second poetry collection, titled, Night Cradle, like those in
Velroy and the Madischie Mafia are lyrical and often indebted to surrealism. Both collections offer depictions of the past as well as the present and tell stories of haunted lands. The poems of Night Cradle are each unique in their own way and at the same time flow together to tell an imagistic story. Hoahwah’s descriptions of the supernatural are imaginative and embody characteristics of Native American religion and witchcraft, which is evident in each of his poems.
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Through a wide variation of ideas and images these elements combine to create a beautifully crafted subtle narrative to this collection of poems.
Sy Hoahwah is clearly a talented poet, and the influences of his Native American heritage,
and childhood in Southwest Oklahoma, both come through clearly in his work. His poems offer an accurate and interesting portrayal of a new generation of Native Americans of any tribal heritage. Mr. Hoahwah’s writing is refreshing and unique among other Native writers in that he offers a new perspective on Native American identity and way of life. His poems offer creative narratives evoked through vividly described images, characters and landscapes. Velroy and the Madischie Mafia and Night Cradle are poetry collections which readers will find both entertaining and enlightening.
Nick Brush
A Review of Michael Nye’s Strategies Against Extinction Oftentimes, short story collections amount to nothing more than a mish‐mash of unrelated tales thrown together with the finesse of a dachshund on ice skates. However, Michael Nye’s 2012 debut, Strategies Against Extinction, is not that collection. In his collection of nine short stories, Nye creates nine completely different yet believable worlds in which his all‐too‐real characters struggle to cope with their existence. Each character has his or her own problems in life whether it be a failed marriage or a failed career. Characters range from the projectionist at a movie theater in a dead‐end town, to a vascular surgeon who makes a career‐altering mistake in the operating room, to the infamous Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Each story contained in Strategies draws you in quickly, and doesn’t let up until its conclusion.
The main things that set Nye’s collection apart from others like it are his attention to
detail in both character and plot development. Nye takes the time to introduce his characters in such a way that even with limitations of the short story form, the words become true flesh‐and‐ blood people. The reader is able to feel the pain and loss of the failed relationships found in some of the stories, and almost wants to reach out, put her arm on a character’s shoulder, and tell them, “It’s going to be okay.” As clichéd as it might sound, I felt a true connection to many of the characters in this book. Even the 1950s radio baseball announcer, for example, felt like someone I could run into in my own twenty‐first century life. It’s not just the characters that make a short story, though, and Nye can spin a yarn like nobody’s business. Sometimes an author’s commitment to character development might cause him to overlook certain elements of plot, but Nye has skillfully crafted each of these stories in such a way that the pacing in each never seems to drag. He weaves in minute details that you might not think matter at the start but will have you turning a few pages back after an “AHA!” moment towards the end. Some of the stories end on a high note, and some not‐so‐high, but every story in Strategies is an absolute delight to read. Michael Nye’s Strategies Against Extinction is one hell of a debut, and Nye is truly one hell of a writer. Each of the 240 pages in the collection is well worth reading more than once, and you’ll want to ensure you do so; there are plenty of details that work to flesh out the tales 76
that I didn’t catch on my first read‐through. Strategies will always have a place on my bookshelf, though it may not get a chance to get too comfortable, since I’ll be reading it again very soon.
George McCormick
‘Love Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Have to Go to the Dentist’: An Interview with Francesca Abbate In anticipation of Francesca Abbate’s visit to Cameron University in February, I caught up with the poet via e‐mail where, over several days, we had the following exchange. Abbate’s debut, Troy, Unincorporated (2012, University of Chicago), is a retelling of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde set in the small town of Troy, Wisconsin. This story of love and loss and love again is told through a polyphony of voices, each poem being “spoken” by a kind of rivalry of narrators. Troilus and Criseyde get a voice, but so too do “Pandarus,” “Psyche,” and the “Narrator” (who, as the interview bears out, is Abbate herself—kind of). An ambitious and often surprising book, Troy, Unincorporated is one of the most intimate and moving reading experiences I’ve encountered in years. [George McCormick]: Almost twenty years ago you gave a reading at the University of Montana where, in one of your poems, there was a curious use of the interrogative. As best as I can remember, you read: “Is there a half language of want?” I think there was a stanza break, or a full stop after that, I don’t remember, but I do remember the question holding in the air for a while. In fact that line has held inside me for close to two decades. On occasion I’ve tried stealing it and working it into my own fiction—first in dialogue, where it always came across as pretentious (as it never was in the poem), then later in monologues where it never seemed to fit any of my characters. You can imagine my astonishment, then, when I picked up Troy, Unincorporated and, in the book’s wonderful opening, I read: “Everything is half here/ like the marble head/ of the Greek warrior/ and the lean torso/ of his favorite./ The way the funnel cloud/ which doesn’t seem/ to touch ground does—/ flips a few cars, a semi—/ we learn to walk miles above our bodies.” In the book’s next poem you write: “Praise me, I told the water lilies, for I am half‐invincible,/ half‐destructable, half mad: am, in fact, a divine half// and a half not, and it’s lonely out here and hot,/ and a lifetime has elapsed on this floating path/ with its canopy of poison sumac, its pale, half‐dead/ orchids, the drams of bog people hidden// under the planks—so finely pored, so stubble bladed,/ so adept at heat and loneliness, so not half—for 78
who// will praise me now, I was too clever by half…” So here’s my question: am I crazy to think that some of this wasn’t rooted in some of those poems you were working on so long ago? Do you even remember those poems, much less that line? Did I make all of this up? [Francesca Abbate]: I am astounded that you remember that poem, and I think you’ve got the line exactly, though I can’t remember the lineation. The next line was something about a way to measure the sky and it had something to do with horses, and it was a poem for Lila Cecil. She’d taken me to see some horses. I remember a high hill, tall yellowing grass, and no houses around, seemingly. Just the horses. Anyway. I’m sure the poems in Troy, Unincorporated are related. They grow out of who I was then and who I became, after all. I don’t think this is uncommon, but I’ve always felt as if I live two lives, this one and another life which is not just an interior life, but something almost remembered and/or almost physical that can’t be put into words, that we all do, really, and that art is an oblique glance into it. That other life feels very close sometimes, so close that I think I feel half here and half “there,” which isn’t the right word, of course. I still miss Missoula. But the poems in this book are concerned with that feeling of half‐ness in another way, too. I’d taken a class called “Chaucer for Writers” while I was getting my Ph.D., but I started writing the poems spoken by the characters ten years later. Wow, am I slow, right? Anyway. In the meantime, I was writing other poems, including the two you quote here. So these are some of the earliest. I wasn’t going to include them—it almost felt like cheating to include poems so “old”—but in the middle of working on the manuscript I reread that Chaucer had “revoked” Troilus and Criseyde at the end of his life, because the poem was too worldly, and he wanted to go to heaven. So I felt as though his characters were left to lead half‐lives, too, like they were drifting around out there, rootless, homeless. I felt a kinship with them, an invitation to explore this half‐ness. I wonder, now, too, if this half‐ness also speaks to the separation that’s at the center of—that propels—Chaucer’s poem, which is Criseyde’s betrayal of Troilus. So that’s another half‐ness, a romantic one, the heart split in two. As Montaigne says of the death of his closest friend: “I was already so used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half.” I’ve been reading Montaigne’s essays for a couple years now. It’s slow going for me.
[McCormick]: I didn’t know that about Chaucer, that he “revoked” his work because he wanted to get into heaven. Part of me scoffs at this, but part of me loves the fact that Chaucer lived in a time when poetry really could be dangerous—and he knew that. [Abbate]:The poem’s pretty racy. At one point, Pandarus strips the swooning Troilus and throws him into bed with Criseyde. That renunciation must have sprung from a great faith, I think. God would see through a sham renunciation, after all. And for an author to do that, to turn his back on his work—it’s hard to imagine. It seems very noble and terrible.
Those poems are
[McCormick]: As a fiction writer I’m struck by the richness, intensity, and
some of the most
complexity of your character’s interior lives. Yet this too seems
autobiographical I’ve
Chaucerian; that is, to let each person speak for themself. Even you—
ever written. And yet,
Francesca—gets a voice as the “Narrator.” Am I right to think of this as
of course, they aren’t
influenced by Chaucer? [Abbate]: Oh, thank you. That’s an immense compliment. You fiction
true in the sense of being factual.
writers—I look up to you so much: the work you do, creating a world and sustaining it, structuring it. I sometimes think that this book results from my love of fiction. I love poems that deal with character rather than just the speaker’s ruminations, but my work was doing mostly the latter. I was sick of it. It was so wonderful to hear these people talking that when I finished the manuscript I felt ill. I felt, in some way, gypped. Why couldn’t they have kept talking? But it was no use. It was over. Yes, I am the narrator. Or, to be more exact, the speaker is the narrator. Those poems are some of the most autobiographical I’ve ever written. And yet, of course, they aren’t true in the sense of being factual. Letting each person speak was meant to be very Chaucerian: one of the things I love and admire about Chaucer’s poem is exactly how the narrator was a presence—telling/shaping a story—and also how each character has a distinct voice. They have so much air time in the poem. I marvel at how that happens in such a balanced, nuanced way, and how he manages all those registers. It’s symphonic.
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[McCormick]: You say that you were sick of your poems being “ruminations,” I think I know what you mean: the kind of narrative, epiphany‐based poetry that now seems so common. Who are some poets that you like to read that work outside this model? [Abbate]: There’s nothing wrong with working in that mode, of course, but somewhere along the way I stopped trusting it for myself. There’s a kind of self‐mythologizing that can happen if the poem’s in the first person, for example, and I started wondering to what end. To impress? To seduce? But then again there’s such privilege in writing any kind of poetry. Who cares what kind gets written and with what motivation? And yet, says that stubborn little voice. Regarding what I like to read outside the model—well, I read a lot of nonfiction. But also of course poetry. Anne Carson pops to mind immediately for her novel‐in‐verse Autobiography of Red. Anything that blurs genres interests me. Since I teach, I use my courses (in part) to make sure I get time to read the books that look compelling or important for any reason. I try to choose books that represent a broad selection in terms of style and content. (This is a question that troubles me: what are the best books to give students? But that’s another discussion.) This semester the list included Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, Kevin Young’s To Repel Ghosts: The Remix, Michael Dickman’s Flies, and Srikanth Reddy’s Readings in World Literature. Young’s book evokes Jean‐Michel Basquiat’s art and person in an immersive way. It’s one of those books that’s really hard to describe, but as the back cover blurb from Art in America puts it, “it may be the best interpretive study yet of Basquiat’s art.” Also, Young’s line breaks are devastating. You can learn so much from them. Smith’s work is both empathetic and clear‐sighted, and that’s a tricky balance. It’s probably closest to the “narrative, epiphany‐based poetry” you mention. But mostly it’s about other people. And social injustices and tragedies. And so the epiphanies, when they come, seem generous and expansive. You feel like only someone who is very wise and very human could write the poems. Dickman is, I think, working from the tradition of lyric epiphany but his epiphanies are rapid‐fire and unpretty. They don’t close his poems. They come in bursts and leave me feeling queasy. “The light is puking pure white onto the ground,” for example. And then the poem goes on like nothing horrible has happened and even worse things happen. I’d have to say that Reddy’s was the book I most looked forward to reading and was most afraid of reading. I’ve been writing prose poems which include some description of life in the underworld,
and Reddy’s narrator is teaching a class called “Introduction to the Underworld.” Quite a few of the prose poems in his book take place in that classroom or meditate on some pretty dark matter. One of my favorite passages closes the first poem: “Contrary to the accounts of Mu Lian, Odysseus, and Kwasi Benefo, for example, it is not customarily permitted to visit the underworld. No, the underworld visits you.” It’s a brilliant and frightening and hilarious book and I was scared I’d finish it and think, well, I can’t write about that now. Actually, I do think that, but I’m going to keep writing what I’m writing anyway, because I don’t know what else to do. [McCormick]: I find your book’s structure to be really interesting: four sections, each prefaced by an epigraph from Troilus and Criseyde. The intertextuality between your lines and Chaucer’s makes for a kind of scholar’s art here, yet the book resists being esoteric. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided on the structure of the book—the four sections, the epigraphs—and how you settled on the six different ‘voices’. [Abbate]: Each poem at one point had its own quote from Chaucer’s poem as a title. The readers at University of Chicago felt that it was too much Chaucer, and I’m sure they were right. But cutting those lines was hard for me. I’d really felt that each poem was inextricably linked to them. Umbilical cords, they were. I kept the longer quotes as section breaks. They point toward where the book is in terms of Chaucer’s chronology, and they’re beautiful, of course, so there’s that. Chaucer’s poem is in five parts. Oh, did I want Troy to be in five parts. I used a quote from Seth Lerer’s book Chaucer and His Readers about an “incomplete love letter” as an epigraph because in the end I felt as though it was okay that Troy was only four sections. It wasn’t meant to be whole. It’s an incomplete love letter to Chaucer and his characters. About the cast of characters: well, the history of Troilus and Criseyde’s story is one of borrowings and revisions. Chaucer wasn’t the first to tell it, and he wasn’t the last. (I got to see Shakespeare’s play last year—it’s not produced that often, and it was so wonderful to see it.) Helen plays a part in Chaucer’s poem, as does Cassandra, who’s Troilus’s sister. And I did feel as if I wanted some kind of narrator. The narrator’s poems include events that chime with Chaucer’s plot, rather than echo them exactly. Chaucer’s narrator is repeating a story he’s read.
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He’s both at the mercy of story—he can’t change the outcome—and in charge of how it’s told. That’s how I felt. I really don’t know where Psyche came from. She’s not a part of Chaucer’s poem. When I wrote the poem that you quoted from above, I didn’t know who the speaker was. I knew she was mythical, but I didn’t know until I was writing this book—and writing the poem about Psyche getting a chili dog, in particular—that I figured it out. Psyche has an epic quest in the myth Psyche and Cupid, and yet the tasks she’s given to accomplish are so domestic. I think I felt Psyche’s presence as underpinning the story. She goes through hell, literally, but gets a happy ending—Cupid and immortality. Troy, Unincorporated ends with Criseyde falling in love with Diomedes. (Chaucer doesn’t know whether or not she’s in love with him—it’s as if he just can’t imagine the scope of that betrayal.) But Criseyde doesn’t get to become immortal—just the opposite, really. A life begins for her, with love. But love doesn’t mean you don’t have to go to the dentist. It doesn’t mean that the possibility for grave hurt, for betrayal, for abandonment, is over. She’s the vulnerable one at the close—especially since Troilus has died. [McCormick]: Earlier you mentioned that kind of hollowed out feeling you get when you finish a manuscript. I’ve found that if I don’t make a radical formal or conceptual change from one work to the next it’s impossible to begin again. What has it been like getting on to the next poems after Troy? [Abbate]: I really understand this, George. And sometimes I worry that changing so drastically
So I started writing down lines that I loved and those lines grew into a daybook of sorts.
from manuscript to manuscript means I don’t have a style. Look at Dickman, for example: his second book sounds very much like his first. Ashbery sounds like Ashbery, Glück like Glück. But I bet they feel as if they make “radical formal or conceptual” changes with each new work. It was hard to start writing again. I was on sabbatical, and supposed to be writing, after all, but I hadn’t planned on a new project. I thought I’d be
revising Troy, but the publication schedule was faster than the editor or I thought it would be, and I was done with revisions in July. One day in early fall I went to the bookstore and was sitting outside with the ubiquitous Starbucks cappuccino (is every bookstore connected to a Starbucks?) flipping through my purchase, Montaigne’s Essays—which, as I mentioned earlier,
I’m still reading—and this sort of scruffy guy with a cigarette stopped in front of me and said, That’s a great book. You should take notes. So I started writing down lines that I loved and those lines grew into a daybook of sorts that included more than Montaigne. I was fairly depressed and sitting at home a lot in Milwaukee and getting obsessed with the weather and just doodling, really. And one day I mistook the words “No Body” in my own handwriting (I was quoting from a newspaper article about a woman found dead on the trail I bike) for “Not Baby.” I had also recently come across a mention of Persephone’s daughter Melinoe, whose name means “dark thought.” And these sort of disparate pieces started coming together during an unsettling period of coincidences and other weirdnesses and I started writing long prose poems about Not Baby, aka Melinoe. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I couldn’t ignore the plot arc in Chaucer’s poem when I was writing Troy, and I think it helped give me structure. I feel pretty much at sea now and may be for a while. I know some people who can write during the school year, but I’m not one of them. So that’s difficult, because I only really write during summer. It could be years before I find my way, and I might have to throw everything out to get there. It’s okay, though. I generally write out of a sense of desperation anyway. Is that true of many writers? Most writers? I feel like it is, but maybe I can’t imagine writing from a place less fraught or necessary. 84
Contributors Jose Angel Araguz has had work most recently in Slipstream, Gulf Coast, and Apple Valley Review as well as featured in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. His chapbook, The Wall, is published by Tiger's Eye Press. He is presently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati. Casey Brown is from Pendleton, Oregon. She is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing at Cameron University. Her flash fiction piece “Passive Voice” was a co‐winner of the Page One Gallery at Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in 2013. She is a staff writer for the Cameron Collegian, a member of Sigma Tau Delta, and a tutor. Casey lives, studies, and writes in Lawton, Oklahoma. James Brubaker lives and writes in Oklahoma. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in venues including Zoetrope: All Story, Hobart, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Normal School, and Web Conjunctions, among others. Look for James' short collection of fake pilot episodes, Pilot Season (Sunnyoutside Press), and his debut full‐length story collection Liner Notes (Subito Press) in 2014. James is also an associate editor for The Collapsar. Nick Brush is an Army veteran currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing at Cameron University. He is originally from Rogers, Arkansas, but has traveled to many different places with his time in the military. He enjoys both reading and writing poetry, and hopes to share his love of poetry with students of his own one day. Jim Davis is a graduate of Knox College and an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he edits the North Chicago Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Columbia Literary Review among nearly three hundred publications. Jim is the winner of multiple contests, prizes, Editor's Choice awards, and a recent nomination for Best of the Net Anthology. His book, Assumption (Unbound Content, 2013) will soon be followed by book two, Earthmover (Unbound Content). Phil Estes work has recently appeared in Everyday Genius, The Lifted Brow, and Lungfull! He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Over one hundred of David Galef’s poems have appeared in magazines ranging from Shenandoah and Witness to The Yale Review and Literary Imagination. He has published over a dozen volumes, including novels, short story collections, translation, and criticism, but also the 86
poetry book Flaws and two chapbooks of verse, Lists and Apocalypses. He is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University. Ashley Galan is a sophomore at Cameron University and a member of the Comanche Nation Tribe of Oklahoma. When not doing homework she spends all of her time reading. She lives in Lawton, Oklahoma with her husband. Katherine Liontas‐Warren, Professor of Art at Cameron University has been a resident of Oklahoma since 1984, where she teaches drawing, watercolor, and printmaking. Katherine has a Master of Fine Art from Texas Tech University and a Bachelor of Science from Southern Connecticut. She is a recipient of the Bhattacharya Research Excellence Award and the Faculty Hall of Fame at Cameron University. Katherine received the title of Artist of the Year by the Paseo Art Association in Oklahoma City and the Artist and Educator of the Year through the Lawton Arts and Humanities Council. Katherine has exhibited her works of art in over 350 exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, and has received numerous purchase and juried awards. Many of her prints and drawings are in permanent collections in Museums and institutions throughout the nation such as Austin Peay University, Arkansas Art Center, Museum of Texas Tech University: The Artist Printmaker Research Collection, The Wichita Falls Museum of Art at Midwestern University, Oklahoma State University, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, University of Colorado, University of North Dakota, Oklahoma Art Institute: Quartz Mountain Lodge, Del Mar College, University of Wisconsin‐Madison, Whitman College in Walla Walla, Butler Community College in Kansas, University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, Leslie Powell Art Foundation Gallery, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Mabee‐ Gerrer Museum of Art, and Nicolls State University. Rachel Parker Martin holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the Florida State University, and plans to enter graduate school to pursue her Master’s degree in Modern Spanish Language and Literature. She has self‐published one chapbook of poetry Small Moves: A Collection of Poems about Love, Distance, Sea and Stars. She enjoys learning different languages, traveling with her studies, and curling up with a good book. George McCormick has published stories, most recently, in Sugar Mule, Epoch, Santa Monica Review, and Willow Springs. He was a 2013 O. Henry Prize winner and his book, Salton Sea, was published in 2012 by Noemi Press. He lives in Lawton, Oklahoma and is teaching in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Cameron University. Zarah Moeggenberg is a poet living in the upper peninsula of Michigan. She is a Master of Fine Arts Poetry Candidate at Northern Michigan University and Associate Poetry Editor of Passages North. She has been most recently published in The Fourth River, ellipsis…literature and art, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and SunDog Lit. She has work forthcoming in Ellipsis Lit Mag, among other publications.
Phong Nguyen is the author of Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Queen's Ferry Press, 2014) and Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011). He currently serves as editor of Pleiades and Pleiades Press, for which he coedited the volume Nancy Hale: The Life and Work of a Lost American Master with Dan Chaon. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Missouri, where he lives with his wife—the artist Sarah Nguyen— and their three sons. Rob Roensch won The International Scott Prize for Short Stories in 2012 from Salt Publishing for his collection titled The Wildflowers of Baltimore. He teaches at Oklahoma City University. His website is https://sites.google.com/site/robroensch/ Jordan Sanderson earned a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His work has recently appeared in Red Earth Review, The Meadow, Gigantic Sequins, and NANO Fiction. He lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Nicole Santalucia serves as the poetry editor of Binghamton University’s literary journal, Harpur Palate. Her work has appeared in Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, and others. She currently teaches creative writing and is a PhD candidate in English at Binghamton University. Andrea Spofford writes poems and essays. Some of which can be found or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Vela Magazine, Kudzu Review, Revolver, paper nautilus, and others. Her chapbook Everything Combustible is available from dancing girl press and her second chapbook is forthcoming from Red Bird Press in 2014. Andrea is poetry editor of Zone 3 Press and lives and works in Tennessee. Constance Squires is the author of Along the Watchtower (Riverhead/Penguin), which won the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction, and the recently completed Live from Medicine Park, of which the story in this issue is an excerpt. Her short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, This Land, New Delta Review, Eclectica, Bayou and other magazines. Her nonfiction has appeared in Salon, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and on the NPR program Snap Judgment. A short film project, entitled Grave Misgivings, which she wrote and narrates is underway with Sundance fellow and Caddo County native Jeffrey Palmer. It's about Geronimo's grave. B. Tacconi is a senior at the University of Houston where she studies creative writing and anthropology. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Glass Mountain and Houston & Nomadic Voices. Megan Vered’s work has been published or is forthcoming in the “First Person” column of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Diverse Arts Project, Mezzo Cammin, Amarillo Bay, and she is among the authors featured in the “Story Chairs” short story installation at Jack Straw 88
Productions in Seattle. Following her mother’s death in 2011, she penned a family story that she sent to her siblings every Friday. This essay is part of that collection.
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